What is systems biology?

I thought I should write short intro to systems biology, mainly because that will help me clarify my thoughts.

So here it is:

What is systems biology?

Systems biology tries to study and model biological phenomena using traditional engineering, physical, chemical and mathematical principles. It is a very new field in its infancy and some say that it came into being after the complete human genome sequence was discovered.
The aim of the systems biology is two fold:

1. To discover and study interactions between constituents of a living cell, tissue, organ, respiratory-circulatory-nervous etc. systems.
Why? Because human body is not just a collection of cells, organs and some systems. The *interactions* that these constituents of body have among each other are as important as the individual function of consituent itself. These interactions give rise to biological phenomena that cannot be imagined when studying individual parts. Traditional biology has always tried to see such parts individually (mainly because of the complexity of studying the whole thing at a time and lack of knowledge about complex dependencies between parts). But there are certain properties called *Emergent properties* that are observable only when the entire system is studied.

[Aside: What are emergent properties? Assume that u r given three mundane things: a tungston wire coiled up as filament, a bottle-like small glass casing and a metal cap. If you study them individually, you can't figure out any use of them. But taken togeather, you know you can generate light using these things. Now, u cant generate light using these components separately. *Light is generated due to interaction between these components as much as due to components individual behaviour* The ability of the system called light bulb to generate light is called emergent property as it cannot be ascribed to any single component]

To understand the emergent properties of a complex system (and its subsystems) called human body, systems biology aims to discover unknown interactions and consequent exhibitable effects. Some people say systems biology is *new biology* and will forever change the face of medical discipline.

2. To model these interactions using mathematical and engineering tools and use this model to predict things such as: effect of drug on certain disease (this was earlier done by intelligent guess works and animal/human trials), a persons health after say 5 years, the exact cause of someones illness and so on…

To achieve above to aims systems biology requires inter-disciplinary work between biologists, physicists, chemical engineers, mathematicians and computer scientists. It seems that systems biology will force all of these disciplines to push the knowledge envelope. It will demand new algorithms and computing facilities from mathematicians and computer scientists. It will demand novel data acquisition and measurement methods from physicists, chemists and biologists.

Typical tasks in the systems biology are:

1. Observing these phenomena using tools such as spectroscopy, MRI, ultrasound and so on…
2. Denoising acquired data.
3. Modelling human biological phenomena (starting from DNA replication to creation of protein to creation of other parts of living cell to their exibitable effects)
4. Predicting clinically important results.
5. Validating predicted results.

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It is really exciting to see the merger of rather different fields of engineering and medicine in this way.

I hope it was not very round-about and boring.