The power of OMICs

Over the past two decades, the field of systems biology, which encompasses the numerous, widely popular OMICs approaches, has driven many significant advances in biomedical research, enabling researchers to generate huge datasets at multiple levels of biological organization. Despite such successes, some scientists still think that OMICs-based research introduces a lot of chaos into the biomedical field and claim that the resultant data are often not reproducible and do not reveal deep mechanistic aspects of biological processes. In this editorial, I argue the following: first, that OMICs technologies have improved significantly to yield much better datasets; and second, that follow-up studies on components identified in OMICs analyses have yielded many valuable biological insights. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.