Difference between revisions of "Category:Systems biology"

Latest revision as of 01:18, 6 October 2014

[edit] Scope

Systems biology is a biology-based inter-disciplinary field of study that focuses on complex interactions within biological systems and how these interactions give rise to the function and behaviour of that system [1].

One of its main goal is to model and discover emergent properties, properties of cells, tissues and organisms functioning as a system whose theoretical description is only possible using techniques which fall under the remit of systems biology. These typically involve metabolic networks or cell signaling networks.

[edit] Methods

Systems biology tries to consider biological systems from more holistic perspective (holism instead of the more traditional reductionism).

Generally cycle of systems biology includes theory, analytic or computational modelling to propose specific testable hypotheses about a biological system, experimental validation, and then using the newly acquired quantitative description of cells or cell processes to refine the computational model or theory [1].

Thus theory part of systems biology uses:

• mathematical modelling
• computational modelling

Since the objective is a model of the interactions in a system, the experimental techniques that most suit systems biology are those that are system-wide and attempt to be as complete as possible. Therefore, high-throughput techniques are used to collect quantitative data for the construction and validation of models, mainly :[Wikipedia 7]

• transcriptomics
• proteomics
• metabolomics

There are two main streams in systems biology:

• computational systems biology
• molecular systems biology

[edit] References

1. Wikipedia, article "Systems biology" [1] [Wiki_1]