This is a short commentary on -omes, in the spirit of reminding.
-omes are the collections of all things in a class associated with an instance of another class. For example, all the genes in a single organism is the ‘genome.’ Because of a variety of complexities in the definition of a gene since 1920, ‘genome’ is tricky, but because it is one of the earliest ‘-omes’ the example is important.
Metabolomes are of all metabolites in an organism. Transcriptomes are all the transcripts. Microbiomes are all the microbes associated with an organism or location (at a specific time). A subset, viromes, are all the viruses.
Meta-omes are the collections of those things in a particular population of the second class. Metagenomes are all the genes in a population of organisms. Metamicrobiomes could be the set of microbes across a population of hosts or locations.
Badomics is making up -omes that are nonsense or pointless (http://www.gigasciencejournal.com/content/1/1/6). The usual motivation is that -ome and -omics sound cool and there is some authority by association. One could imagine that the toiletome is all the toilets in a building and a metatoiletome would be all the toilets in a development, town, or other community. However, this seems like a pretty silly nomenclature (for plenty of silliness, http://www.ark-genomics.org/badomics-generator). Atmospheromics would be even sillier, because for any planet there is at most one atmosphere. A mathematician can logically state that both the empty set and the set containing one element exist – ah, mathematicians (http://www.mathmos.net/misc/jokes.html) – but that doesn’t make the word useful. It would be even worse to use the word atmospherome to refer to the set of all flying animals on a planet.
The ome that has me presently outraged is the ‘vaginome’ (http://motherboard.vice.com/read/enter-the-vaginome). I cannot denigrate this terminology sufficiently without being indecorous. There is no sensible vaginome. Some humans have one vagina, many have none, and the cases of more than one are at best very few. To refer to the bacterial or microbial community of the vagina as the vaginome is at best a basic misunderstanding of scientific terminology. If it were possible to retract a word from journalism, that would be the appropriate action at this time.