 However, in practice, within the field of human disease research there is still a large degree of overlap in the way both terms are used, and they are often in effect synonymous.Exometabolomics, or "metabolic footprinting", is the study of extracellular metabolites.It uses many techniques from other subfields of metabolomics, and has applications in biofuel development, bioprocessing, determining drugs' mechanism of action, and studying intercellular interactions.