Diving Through the “-Omics”: The Case for Deep Phenotyping and Systems Epidemiology

Enabled by diverse high-throughput technologies, the rapidly evolving field of "-omics sciences" offers the potential to study health and disease in breadth and depth at the human population level. We have recently linked genomics and metabolomics to present the first genome-wide association study of metabolic traits in human urine providing new insights into the functional background of chronic kidney disease. We propose systems epidemiology as a novel approach to study the complexities of human pathophysiology by integrating various population-level omic-metrics and to identify new trans-omic biomarkers.