Idea for February 2026: omics

My idea of the month is omics.

Is that really a word? I first tripped over it a couple of weeks ago and yes, it’s a thing.

It’s the collective word for those disciplines in the life sciences that look at the whole of something. For example, genomics looks at the whole genome – all the DNA for an individual or a species.

There’s also proteomics, metabolomics, metagenomics, phenomics and transcriptomics. I can’t pretend to understand all these.

The newest, and mind-blowing, omic is exposomics – a proposal to map all the environmental influences on health, in the way the Human Genome Project did for the genetic influences.

Omics is the idea that by studying all of these things, we can better understand the whole of someone’s biology. So there’s lots of data here and lots of AI. But the end-goal is very exciting, as long as it’s done ethically: fully personalised medicine.

Image by Sangharsh Lohakare on Unsplash.