Systems Biology. University of Ulster

Systems biology is a rapidly emerging discipline within the life sciences offering an organicist view on biology. It is making us aware of the connectedness of living systems where interactions between molecules, genes, cells, species and the environment are responsible for the regulation of biological functions. The emergence of biological function cannot be reduced to a linear summation of the functions of its individual parts but rather needs to be investigated in its natural context. This implies that decoding the individual parts of a biological system by using the bioinformatician's toolbox marks only the first step in the systems biology cycle for knowledge discovery. This cycle describes the process that connects and couples a biological system through an in-vivo or in-vitro experiment to a mathematical model that is based on acquired, quantitative data.