Alzheimer's disease in the omics era

Abstract

Recent progresses in high-throughput technologies have led to a new scenario in investigating pathologies, named the "Omics era", which integrate the opportunity to collect large amounts of data and information at the molecular and protein levels together with the development of novel computational and statistical tools that are able to analyze and filter such data. Subsequently, advances in genotyping arrays, next generation sequencing, mass spectrometry technology, and bioinformatics allowed for the simultaneous large-scale study of thousands of genes (genomics), epigenetics factors (epigenomics), RNA (transcriptomics), metabolites (metabolomics) and proteins(proteomics), with the possibility of integrating multiple types of omics data ("multi -omics"). All of these technological innovations have modified the approach to the study of complex diseases, such as Alzheimer's Disease (AD), thus representing a promising tool to investigate the relationship between several molecular pathways in AD as well as other pathologies. This review focuses on the current knowledge on the pathology of AD, the recent findings from Omics sciences, and the challenge of the use of Big Data. We then focus on future perspectives for Omics sciences, such as the discovery of novel diagnostic biomarkers or drugs.

Keywords: Alzheimer's disease; Big data; Cerebrospinal fluid; Omics; Proteomics; β amyloid.