Systems biology at work.

摘要

In his editorial overview for the 2008 Special Issue on this topic, the lateJaroslav Stark pointedly noted that systems biology is no longer a nichepursuit, but a recognized discipline in its own right ‘‘noisily’’ coming of age1. Whilst general underlying principles and basic techniques are nowreasonably well established, we see a progressive shift from ‘‘fishing expeditions’’through seas of ‘‘omics’’ data towards increasingly more model-drivenresearch generating verifiable hypotheses that are iteratively tested andrefined across different aggregation levels. In this special issue, we illustratethis ethos of systems biology at work in various fields through an eclecticseries of articles thematically grouped under ‘‘methods and tools in networkanalysis’’, ‘‘emerging and enabling technologies’’, ‘‘microbes in disease andthe environment’’, ‘‘human health and disease’’ and ‘‘synthetic biology’’.