Leading Life Sciences and Bioengineering Research through In Vivo; In Vitro; In Silico Technology Approaches

摘要

During the past decade, and principally the last five years, the study of the responses of biological systems has been revolutionized by the possibility to carry out the triad of in vivo, in vitro, and in silico biological research. This has enabled in-depth understanding of the response of biological systems to various experimental conditions and perturbations, including, cell growth, stress conditions, and exposure to drugs or chemical agents, among many other factors. This approach became necessary due to the complex nature of biological systems that made in vivo experimental results difficult to interpret and made study of biological pathways or mechanisms difficult to accomplish. Similarly, in vitro studies alone have demonstrated limited vision of biological systems, since they lack physiological context, while involving numerous assumptions. With the advent of -omics technologies, in silico approaches (initially called computational biology) inspired cell biologists to focus on modeling and simulation of complex biological systems by leveraging huge amounts of data obtained from high throughput screening technologies.