What is "exometabolomics"

Exometabolomics, also known as 'metabolic footprinting', is the study of extracellular metabolites and is a sub-field of metabolomics.

While the same analytical approaches used for profiling metabolites apply to exometabolomics, including liquid-chromatography mass spectrometry (LC-MS), nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC–MS), analysis of exometabolites provides specific challenges and is most commonly focused on investigation of the transformations of exogenous metabolite pools by biological systems. Typically, these experiments are performed by comparing metabolites at two or more time points, for example, spent vs. uninoculated/control culture media; this approach can differentiate different physiological states of wild-type yeast and between yeast mutants. Since, in many cases, the exometabolite ( extracellular) pool is less dynamic than endometabolite ( intracellular) pools (which are often perturbed during sample processing) and chemically defined media can be used, it reduces some of the experimental challenges of metabolomics.

Exometabolomics is also used as a complementary tool with genomic, transcriptomic and proteomic data, to gain insight into the function of genes and pathways. Additionally, exometabolomics can be used to measure polar molecules being consumed or released by an organism, and to measure secondary metabolite production.