Toward Sportomics: Shifting From Sport Genomics to Sport Postgenomics and Metabolomics Specialties. Promises, Challenges, and Future Perspectives

Together with experience, training, dietary intake, and other environmental factors, the biological and genetic makeup of an athlete play a major role in exercise physiology in terms of performance and outcomes.1 Sport genomics has shown that some DNA single-nucleotide polymorphisms can be associated with athlete level and performance (such as elite/world-class athletic status), having an impact on physical activity–related variables like endurance; strength; sprint; power; speed; flexibility; energetic expenditure; neuromuscular coordination; and respiratory, metabolic, and cardiorespiratory fitness, among others. Moreover, single-nucleotide polymorphisms have been shown to correlate with other parameters, including psychological traits.2 The athletic phenotype is extremely complex and multifactorial, depending on the combination of different features and characteristics.3 On this basis, sport performance is a “complex science,” like that of metadata and multiomics profiles. Several ambitious projects (like the Exercise at the Limit—Inherited Traits of Endurance [ELITE], GAMES, Gene Skeletal Muscle Adaptive Response to Training or Gene SMART, GENATHLETE, Genetics of Elite Status in Sport or GENESIS, 1000 Athlomes, Super-Athletes, and POWERGENE trials) are aimed at discovering genomics-based biomarkers with an adequate predictive power.4 These projects are aimed at overcoming the major drawbacks that plagued previous investigations, generally relying on small and rather heterogeneous cohorts of athletes. Sport genomics could enable researchers, athletes, sport scientists, and coaches/managers to optimize and maximize physical performance and identify prevention strategies in the field of individual risk of sport-related injuries (like Achilles tendinopathy or rotator cuff pathologies).3 However, the athlete genome is only a pebble in the mosaic of sport physiology.3 Exercise has a profound impact also on the human proteome, for instance, finely tuning ATP-related pathways and mitochondrial protein synthesis, as well as proteins belonging to inflammation, antioxidation, anticoagulation, and iron.5 Moreover, exercise modulates transcription patterns and epigenetics, as well as metabolic profiles. All these different omics specialties (like sport genomics, epigenomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics/metabonomics) converge in a unique approach termed as “sportomics.”3,6 Introduced for the first time by Brazilian scientist Cameron and colleagues,