Systems Biology Brings Life Sciences Closer: —Report on the China-UK Systems Biology Workshop 2005

Chen, Ming

It was noted that in the past decades molecular biology has produced huge amounts of data describing metabolic mechanisms and pathways, structural genomic organization, patterns of regulatory regions, proteomics, transcriptomics, and metabolomics. In the coming decades, we will see the coming together of molecular biology, cellular biology, physiology, and computer science, so that the biological system will be understood at the system level. For this understanding, systems biology will be absolutely central. Gaining insights of the complex biological systems requires methods available for appropriately analyzing biological data with dynamical models and thus for extracting information on the structure and regulation of biological systems. The goal is to come to a mutual understanding about the basic concepts in genomics, proteomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics, interactomics, etc. and their global approaches to characterize biological systems. On one hand, systems biology depends on advances in experimental biology that generates high-throughput data characterizing the expression of genomes, activity patterns of proteins, and the simultaneous profiles of metabolite concentrations. On the other hand, integration and analysis of these data is determined essentially by the methods and concepts of computer science. Currently, there are more than 700 database information systems and various analytical methods/tools available via the Internet. The challenge we have is to integrate these information and software tools at novel levels of understanding. Systems biology would be this new approach of research integrating biological data and using the methods of computer science and electronic infrastructure applied to understand the mechanism of biology. It also represents the backbone of the concept of the Virtual Cell, which becomes the key scientific topic of integrative biology in this century.