There’s a new name for this that reflects the modern ‘omic’ age: metabolomics. We have known all the steps in the major metabolic pathways for decades – they were laboriously worked out, step by step, from the 1930s onwards, with a leap forward in the post-war years, when radioactive tracers enabled the fate of specific carbon atoms to be tracked (as we’ll see in Chapter 2). Metabolomics is much the same thing, but now with the aid of powerful techniques such as mass spectrometry. Instead of seeking the commonalities – the same metabolic pathways in different cells – metabolomics looks for the
...more
