"foodomics" and other omics

[Ben Zimmer]

On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 9:52 AM, Laurence Horn wrote:
>
> No idea whether it rhymes with "comics" or "NO-mix", but here it is,
> in an e-mail sent out to me and possibly some of you, from
> <foodomics at unibo.it>:
>
> We are pleased to inform you that the 2nd International Conference
> "Food-Omics: a science for nutrition, health and wellness in the
> post-genomic era" will take place in Cesena (Italy), on June 22-24,
> 2011.
>
> Food-Omics 2011 will be the scientific forum where academic and
> industrial scientists involved in food and nutrition research will
> discuss about the most recent advances in the "omics" approach. The
> key themes will be OMIC SCIENCES FOR FOOD (Food Quality and
> Biodiversity), FOOD FOR OPTIMAL NUTRITION (Nutrigenetics,
> Nutrigenomics), FOOD FOR WELLNESS (Ageing and Disease Prevention) and
> INDUSTRIAL FOOD IMPROVEMENT (Processing and Biotechnology). [...]

The mention of "nutrigenomics" makes it clear that this is the
"OH-mix" type of -omics, nothing to do with economics, ergonomics, or
comics. The suffix came up in discussions of "culturomics" (2010 ADS
WOTY winner in the Least Likely to Succeed category)  -- see my Word
Routes column on the topic:

http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordroutes/2551/

So apparently "omic(s)" has been lexicalized, following the rough path
of "hamburger" > "-burger" > "burger". Here's an example of adjectival
"omic":

---
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15935808
Chem Biol Interact. 2005 May 30;153-154:123-7. Epub 2005 Apr 19.
Use of 'Omic' technologies to study humans exposed to benzene.
'Omic' technologies include genomics, transcriptomics (gene expression
profiling), proteomics and metabolomics.
---

--bgz

--
Ben Zimmer
http://benzimmer.com/

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