Introduction: Canis lupus familiaris is a domestic dog and many owners consider their pets as a family member. Medical bills with dogs are overcame only by the health care received by humans. Medical care is constantly progressing, and so is veterinary care. Metabolomics is the ''omic" technique aimed to the study of metabolome, low-molecular weight molecules, through biofluids or tissue samples. And it also allows to evaluate disease diagnosis and prognosis, therapeutic evaluation and toxicological studies.
Objectives: The goal of this paper is to review the current and potential applications of metabolomics in domestic dogs.
Method: ScienceDirect, Scopus, Reaxys and PubMed were searched for papers that performed canine metabolomics in any research area.
Results: We analysed 38 papers, published until April 2019 in canine metabolomics approach. Metabolomic research in dogs so far can be divided into three areas: (a) Metabolomics studies in veterinary science, such as improving pet dogs health and welfare. (b) Diet, breeds and species discrimination. (c) Use of dogs as animal model in different diseases and drug development (evaluation toxicity and effect).
Conclusions: The results of this review showed that interest in metabolomics is growing in veterinary research. Several canine diseases have been evaluated with some promise for potential biomarker and/or disease mechanism discovery. Because canine metabolomics is a relatively new area, the researches spread across different research areas and with few studies in each area.
Keywords: Age; Analytical methods; Animal model; Breed; Diseases; Dogs; Metabolomics; Nutrition; Species; Veterinary science.