SYSTEMS BIOLOGY: A SCIENCE OF NETWORKS

Systems Biology is a new scientific field focusing on the holistic analysis of the cell. Its main contribution to science is to enable the understanding of the functionality and working principles of the cell through a systemwide analysis. The major scientific development facilitating such an analysis is collecting high-throughput socalled ʹomicsʹ data, which constitute the main driving force behind the birth of systems biology. One other requirement for a systemic analysis is a detailed construction of cellular networks and a subsequent closer investigation of these networks in the light of collected experimental data. Integrated analysis of ʹomicsʹ data with the three major types of cellular networks (metabolic, regulatory, and signaling) allows the investigation of the change in the behaviours of these networks in different conditions such as healthy vs. diseased or wild-type organism vs. mutant organism. Network-based analysis of the cell means a simultaneous focus on hundreds of genes, proteins and metabolites functioning in the cell. This is a major step towards constructing a computer representation of the cell (in silico cell), a platform to perform computer-based experiments to test several hypotheses and constructing new ones, minimizing the lab experiments and accelerating the biological science towards the perfection.