Systems Biology-Based Platforms to Accelerate Research of Emerging Infectious Diseases

Oh, Soo-Jin; Choi, Young-Ki; Shin, Ok Sarah

Before conducting a large-scale systems biology approach, one should consider the following limitations. Although previous studies involving mathematical modeling of the dynamics of immune responses can provide clues for optimal experimental design, systems-level experiments should be very carefully designed to control for all variables in terms of time points. Furthermore, given that an immune response occurs as a consequence of coordinated events among many immune cells over space and time, it is important to understand how immune cells respond at both the cell population and the single cell level. Single-cell sequencing allows researchers to examine the genomes or transcriptomes of individual cells, thus providing a high-resolution view of cell-to-cell variation. This technique can be used to assess the individual contribution of single cells in complex tissues by profiling the transcriptome in an unbiased manner. In addition, technological problems during systems biology approaches can be resolved by the solutions shown in Table 2 .