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In this postgenomic era, there is a specific need to assign function to orphan genes in order to validate potential targets for drug therapy and to discover new biomarkers of disease. Metabolomics is an emerging field that is complementary to the other ‘omics and proving to have unique advantages. As in transcriptomics or proteomics, a typical metabolic fingerprint or metabolomic experiment is likely to generate thousands of data points, of which only a handful might be needed to describe the problem adequately. Extracting the most meaningful elements of these data is thus key to generating useful new knowledge with mechanistic or explanatory power.