Editorial overview: Systems biology: Advances in multi-scale systems biology applications

摘要

The foundations of our current understanding of biological systems lie in painstaking, molecular-level discoveries of genes, mRNA, proteins, and metabolites. Ever more detailed networks have been built from these data, often characterized in a step-by-step, one enzyme at a time manner. This increasing molecular complexity now necessitates more advanced modes of analysis, requiring scientists to first define a system of given size and biochemical or biophysical flavor and subsequently conduct multi-level quantitative analyses to extract and interpret data in the context of network function. Looking forward, novel concepts are needed to understand how behavior of cellular networks is shaped by the intrinsic stochasticity of biological processes. Despite these challenges, systems biology has made tremendous progress over the last years, and its applications now pervade biological research, contributing to a new understanding of biology at scales ranging from metabolic and protein networks to microbial communities and human physiology. This issue of Current Opinion in Biotechnology highlights recent advances in Systems Biology which promise to have major impact on basic research, biomedicine and biotechnology.