Transcriptomics to devise human health and disease

Advances in high-throughput techniques, often referred to as omics-based technologies, have accelerated research and have contributed for a better genetic and biological characterization of complex diseases. Current “Omics” research has mainly been focused on genes (genomics), messenger-RNA (mRNA) and noncoding (nc) RNAs (transcriptomics), epigenetic factors (epigenomics), proteins (proteomics), metabolites (metabolomics), lipids (lipidomics), and gut microbiota (microbiomics) signatures associated with different phenotypes and diseases. Different platforms and bioinformatics tools have been developed to explore the massive amount of data generated by research using omics-based approaches embedded in the Systems Biology theoretical and computational framework. This chapter will be focused on transcriptomics, presenting an overview of this category of “omics,” discussing the techniques used for this analysis, its main applications, and the integration of transcriptome data with other “omics” using system biology approaches.