Metallomics: Integrated biometal science

Abstract

The historical aspects of metallomics, which were proposed as integrated biometal science in 2004 by the present author, are described. The significant development of analytical atomic spectrometry since the late 1960s allowed the all-element analyses of various biological samples as well as chemical speciation analysis of trace elements. Such a progress of trace metal analysis opened new era of trace metal science in various scientific fields to cooperate with omics sciences such as genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics. Under such situations in life science, it was desired to integrate biometal science as one of omics sciences for further development. So far, the international symposiums of metallomics were held five times around the world since 2007 in Nagoya, and the academic journal of metallomics has been published since 2009 from the Royal Society of Chemistry. Furthermore, essentiality and toxicity of trace metals, a simplified model of the biological system, the research fields in metallomics, and so forth are discussed in this chapter.