Happy new year, and happy #OMFScienceWednesday! As many of you out there are recovering from the holidays, today’s topic is metabolomics. Metabolomics simply describes a way to study metabolism – that is, through measuring amounts of the metabolites (small molecules) produced by our bodies as we convert food into energy and other molecules that our cells need to survive. Metabolomics technology is ‘large-scale,’ meaning that several thousand metabolites can be measured from a single sample of e.g., blood or urine.
Metabolomics has become a very hot topic in ME / CFS research, and one that we are involved in supporting, because Dr. Ron Davis and several independent teams have used it to show metabolic differences between patients and healthy controls. This certainly makes sense based on what we know about the disease and patients not having the energy to perform the functions they always could. Metabolism is incredibly complex and can vary a lot even in healthy individuals, so it’s important to collect as much data as possible from patients. More metabolomics data will help us to understand what exactly is going wrong in ME / CFS metabolism (or if different things are going wrong in different patients), help identify metabolic biomarkers, and hopefully point to treatments that can compensate for any defects in metabolism. That’s why we are funding studies like those of Ron Davis’ lab at Stanford and Bob Naviaux’s lab at UCSD.
To learn more about metabolomics and metabolism, check out this training link.
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