System biologic approach

systems biology is a whole-istic approach to understanding biology

(Chong and Ray 2002). It aims at system-level understanding of
biology, and to understand biological systems as a system. This means
an examination of the structure and dynamics of cellular and organismal
function, rather than the characteristics of isolated parts of a cell or
organism (Kitano 2002). Many properties of life arise at the systems
level only, as the behavior of the system as a whole cannot be
explained by its constituents alone.

Prominent examples for biological systems are the immune system or

the nerve system, which already have the word system included, but
system-level understanding is still far away. Although the idea of
system-level understanding is not new in biology (Wiener
1948; Bertalanffy 1969), the renewed interest can be assigned to the
breakthrough advances in molecular biology in the last decades,
providing new data, enabling applied work in this area, making the in
silico model of an organism envisionable.

http://www.sysbio.de/info/background/WhatIs.shtml

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Identifying all the genes and proteins in an organism is like listing all the
parts of an airplane. While such a list provides a catalog of the individual
components, by itself it is not sufficient to understand the complexity
underlying the engineered object. We need to know how these parts are
assembled to form the structure of the airplane. This is analogous to drawing
an exhaustive diagram of gene-regulatory networks and their biochemical
interactions. Such diagrams provide limited knowledge of how changes to
one part of a system may affect other parts, but to understand how a
particular system functions, we must first examine how the individual
components dynamically interact during operation

. We must seek answers to questions such as: What is the voltage on each
signal line? How are the signals encoded? How can we stabilize the voltage
against noise and external fluctuations? And how do the circuits react when a
malfunction occurs in the system? What are the design principles and
possible circuit patterns, and how can we modify them to improve system
performance?

Kitano, H. Systems biology: a brief overview. Science 295,

16621664 (2002).

Perhaps the most important consequence of the Human Genome Project is

that it is pushing scientists toward a new view of biologywhat we call the
systems approach. Systems biology does not investigate individual genes or
proteins one at a time, as has been the highly successful mode of biology for
the past 30 years. Rather, it investigates the behavior and relationships of all
of the elements in a particular biological system while it is functioning.

Ideker, T., Galitski, T. & Hood, L. A new approach to decoding

life: systems biology. Annu. Rev. Genomics Hum. Genet. 2,
343372 (2001).

Compare with a Chemical Plant

AND Compare with
an Electronic Circuit
Diagram Create a
wiring diagram