At around the turn of the 21st century, the worm of molecular biology began to turn as people started to realize that approaching the molecular activity in a cell or organism in a piecewise way, one molecule at a time, was not going to explain biological activity because too much was going on and too many proteins were involved in even the simplest of phenomena. Earlier concerns that we knew too little about the proteome had been met by the availability of high-throughput technologies such as microarray analysis. Such technologies generated very large amounts of molecular data on a wide range of physiological, developmental and evolutionary phenomena, but earlier hopes that this plethora of information could be integrated on the basis of bottom-up approaches had soon been dashed. The new subject of systems biology reflects the wish to make sense of all this data in a much broader context.
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