About this site
Why have we set up the Omics Gateway and who will benefit from using it?
Biology has become a data-rich subject, with genome-scale studies occurring in all fields. In order to be maximally effective, the whole research community needs to be able to navigate this mass of published information. Ideally, repositories for such information also need to be accessible, comprehensive and regularly updated. There are, of course, excellent public databases for many types of data project, and Nature Publishing Group (NPG) as a whole continues to work with them to deposit data from our published papers.
The Omics Gateway is NPG’s contribution to the synthesis of information that is crucial to moving forward in large-scale biology. Like the ‘hairball’ diagrams depicting interaction networks, groups of publications can be viewed from many different angles to determine the relationships between them. Here on the Omics Gateway you can find papers and reports in related fields by browsing either subject or organism categories. You can sign up for regular e-alerts or RSS feeds that will make sure you are up to date with research and review papers on large-scale biology published in all NPG journals, as well as related material including News and Views, Commentary and Research Highlight articles covering the most significant papers published elsewhere. Papers and articles are contributed by all relevant research and reviews journals throughout NPG.
Why ‘omics’
Ever since the rise of genomics, the suffix ‘-omics’ has been added to the names of many fields to denote studies undertaken on a large or genome-wide scale. While not everyone agrees with this change, we feel that the terms are sufficiently widely used to serve as pointers to our published papers in the area. Although we might not yet be able to precisely define the metabolome, we can all appreciate that studies in this area should yield novel insight into the processes that drive cellular metabolism and the detailed interactions between them.
The following definition of ‘omics’ can be found on The Omics Wiki:
"Omics is a general term for a broad discipline of science and engineering for analyzing the interactions of biological information objects in various ‘omes’. […] The main focus is on: 1) mapping information objects such as genes, proteins, and ligands; 2) finding interaction relationships among the objects; 3) engineering the networks and objects to understand and manipulate the regulatory mechanisms; and 4) integrating various omes and omics subfields."
We have therefore included subject areas for both well-known and up-and-coming areas in large-scale biology; in many cases, papers are can be found in several subject areas, as befits their interdisciplinary nature. For ease of use, we have also categorized the papers by the organism(s) that they primarily focus on.
We hope that you will find NPG’s Omics Gateway interesting and informative, and we welcome your feedback. These pages are updated with new content on a regular basis.
Nick Campbell, Managing Editor, Nature
Mary Muers, Associate Editor, Nature Reviews Genetics
Feedback
Our goal is to make this a site that you will find both stimulating and informative, so we welcome your feedback. Should you have any questions or suggestions, please e-mail feedback@nature.com
Sponsorship
To find out more about our sponsorship opportunities, please contact:
Amélie Péquignot
Business Development Manager
Nature Publishing Group
4 Crinan Street
London N1 9XW
United Kingdom
T: +44 (0) 20 7843 4974
F: +44 (0) 20 7843 4996
E: a.pequignot@nature.com
Image accreditations
NPG would like to acknowledge the individuals and institutions that kindly provided us with images that are featured in the Tree of Life and organism pages. The images of bacteria, and proteobacteria were supplied by Dennis Kunkel Microscopy.
