250. Omics

Excerpt from "Here's an Omical Tale: Scientists Discover Spreading Suffix," by Robert Lee Hotz, The Wall Street Journal, 8/14/12:


In the beginning, there was the genome.
Then came the foldome, the phenome and the connectome, quickly followed by the secretome, the otherome and the unknome.

Over the past decade, a linguistic trickle swelled into a flood of buzzwords tagged with the curiously resonant suffix "ome." Today, hundreds of "omic" terms have worked their way into the lexicon, coined mostly by scientists intent on creating new sub-specialties.

"It sounds futuristic. It sounds computational," said medical geneticist Robert C. Green at Harvard Medical School, who studies what he and his colleagues call the incidentalome—the realm of all incidental medical findings. "When you use the term "omics," it signals you are a new paradigm guy."

Generally, the new terms in scientific literature are meant to highlight the study of a comprehensive collection of data—such as all proteins in a cell (the proteome), all patent law rulings (the patentome) or all human culture (the culturome). Researchers hope to attract attention—and perhaps funding—by giving their topic a name brand that echoes the broader scientific advances of genomics.