Integrative data mining in systems biology: from text to network mining

摘要

Systems biology is a new field that aims to gain system-level understanding of complex functions of biological systems and biological processes, ranging from molecules to cells, tissues, or entire organisms. From the systems science point of view, many important properties of a complex system emerge from the interaction of system components and, therefore, rather than investigating the characteristics of isolated system parts separately, systems biologists focus on discovering emergent properties and functions that do not appear in individual components, but are driven by the interactions among all the system components or component groups .rnA general framework of systems biology can be described by three main steps: (1) identifying elements/components of the system; (2) describing the system using connective networks, in which nodes represent the system components and edges represent interactions between nodes. The network describes the functional relationship among the system components, and the interactions ultimately determine an organism's behavior and functions; (3) gaining insights into emergent properties of biological systems by means of analyzing structural properties and dynamics of the network.