According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the suffix ‘omics’ refers to ‘the totality of some sort’. In biology, ‘omics’ techniques are used for the high-throughput analysis of DNA sequences and epigenetic modifications (genomics), mRNA and miRNA transcripts (transcriptomics), expressed proteins (proteomics), as well as synthesised metabolites (metabolomics) in a biological system (cell, tissue, organism, etc.) under a given set of experimental conditions.
Due to the high number of variables that are measured simultaneously, these techniques provide large and complex datasets that require adapted tools for data analysis and interpretation.