Principal Component Analysis in the Era of «Omics» Data

The «omics» era, also called classically the post-genomic era, is described as the period of time which extends the first publication of the human genome sequence draft in 2001 (International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium, 2001; Venter et al., 2001). Ten years after that milestone, extensive use of high-throughput analytical technologies, high performance computing power and large advances in bioinformatics have been applied to solve fundamental molecular biology questions as well as to find clues concerning human diseases (cancers) and aging. Principal «omics», such as Gen-omics, Transcript-omics, Proteomics and Metabol-omics, are biology disciplines whose main and extremely ambitious objective is to describe as extensively as possible the complete class-specific molecular components of the cell. In the «omics» sciences, the catalog of major cell molecular components, respectively, genes, messenger RNAs and small interfering and regulatory RNAs, proteins, and metabolites of living organisms, is recorded qualitatively as well as quantitatively in response to environmental changes or pathological situations. Various research communities, organized in institutions both at the academic and private levels and working in the «omics» fields, have spent large amounts of effort and money to reach. standardization in the different experimental and data processing steps. Some of these «omics» specific steps basically include the following: the optimal experimental workflow design, the technology-dependent data acquisition and storage, the pre-processing methods and the post-processing strategies in order to extract some level of relevant biological knowledge from usually large data sets. Just like Perl (Practical Extraction and Report Language) has been recognized to have saved the Human Genome project initiative (Stein, 1996), by using accurate rules to parse genomic sequence data, other web-driven. programming languages and file formats such as XML have also facilitated «omics» data dissemination among scientists and helped rationalize and integrate molecular biology data.