Despite all the technology we have for measuring and quanitifying organismal processes and structures within biomedicine, production biology and other areas of biology, our ability to characterize phenomes - the full set of phenotypes of an individual - is very far from what is needed in a wide array of contexts. Phenomics, understood as the acquisition of phenotypic data on an organism-wide scale, should be recognized and pursued as an independent discipline to enable the development and adoption of high-throughput and high-dimensional phenotyping. NTNU has a long and successful track record for developing medical phenomics technology for clinical use (LINK). In addition to this work, this research stream includes deveopment of phenotyping technology for biomedical research, production biology and industrial biotechnology.

Phenotype space is a vast place, however, and the inclusion of more and more phenotypic data through development of new phenotyping technology will always demand prioritising what to measure. As a mathematical model of a given biological processes is an unprecedented guide for identifying which new phenotypic data (and thus which new phenotyping technologies) should be prioritised for acquiring new insight, we have a clear focus on developing a culture for what may be called Model-guided Phenomics Technology development.