Systems biology

Systems biology is the computational and mathematical modeling of complex biological systems. An emerging engineering approach applied to biological scientific research, systems biology is a biology-based interdisciplinary field of study that focuses on complex interactions within biological systems, using a holistic approach (holism instead of the more traditional reductionism) to biological research. Particularly from year 2000 onwards, the concept has been used widely in the biosciences in a variety of contexts. For example, the Human Genome Project is an example of applied systems thinking in biology which has led to new, collaborative ways of working on problems in the biological field of genetics. One of the outreaching aims of systems biology 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.

Systems biology can be considered from a number of different aspects:

This variety of viewpoints is illustrative of the fact that systems biology refers to a cluster of peripherally overlapping concepts rather than a single well-delineated field. However the term has widespread currency and popularity as of 2007, with chairs and institutes of systems biology proliferating worldwide.

Systems biology finds its roots in:

One of the theorists who can be seen as one of the precursors of systems biology is Ludwig von Bertalanffy with his general systems theory. One of the first numerical simulations in cell biology was published in 1952 by the British neurophysiologists and Nobel prize winners Alan Lloyd Hodgkin and Andrew Fielding Huxley, who constructed a mathematical model that explained the action potential propagating along the axon of a neuronal cell. Their model described a cellular function emerging from the interaction between two different molecular components, a potassium and a sodium channel, and can therefore be seen as the beginning of computational systems biology. Also in 1952, Alan Turing published The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis, describing how non-uniformity could arise in an initially homogeneous biological system.

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