Abstract
The immune system plays a vital role in health and disease, and is regulated through a complex interactive network of many different immune cells and mediators. To understand the complexity of the immune system, we propose to apply a multi-omics approach in immunological research. This review provides a complete overview of available methodological approaches for the different omics data layers relevant for immunological research, including genetics, epigenetics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and cellomics. Thereafter, we describe the various methods for data analysis as well as how to integrate different layers of omics data. Finally, we discuss the possible applications of multi-omics studies and opportunities they provide for understanding the complex regulatory networks as well as immune variation in various immune-related diseases.
Highlights
Infections cause millions of deaths each year, and the current COVID-19 pandemic underlines the devastating effects of these communicable diseases
We demonstrate how recent studies applied a multi-omics approach to the immune system researches, and we discuss the interpretation of results from different approaches and their importance in immunological studies
As the starting point of the central dogma of molecular biology (Figure 2), genetics has so far received a lot of attention and was associated with many types of data or phenotypes
Summary
Infections cause millions of deaths each year, and the current COVID-19 pandemic underlines the devastating effects of these communicable diseases. A Review of Multi-Omics Approaches response to a certain stimulus or infection is highly variable between individuals, leading to population heterogeneity. This heterogeneity is exemplified by differences in severity of patients suffering from the same infectious disease [3], variability in vaccine efficacy [4], and variation in responses to the same medical treatment [5]. A study on fecal fungal microbiota of COVID-19 patients showed enrichment of Candia albicans and a highly heterogeneous mycobiome configuration during hospitalization [11] From different angles, these studies make use of omics data to provide insights in the molecular pathology of COVID-19, which can eventually lead to improved therapeutic strategies. As for detailed information on computational algorithms and models in multi-omics integration [14, 15], imputation on missing omics data [16], and strengths and limitations of system approaches in infectious diseases research [17], we refer readers to other recent reviews
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