Systems biology … in action

摘要

Systems biology is a new field in the molecular life sciences. It is new as molecular biology was in the fifties and as cell biology was in the seventies. In my definition, systems biology is a science that aims to elucidate the general principles that govern the emergence of biological function from the interactions of components of living systems. Biological function is defined as all it takes for an organism to survive momentarily and under various stresses that reflect what its ancestors have been subject to in evolution. The components are the biological macromolecules, largely (although not completely) encoded by the genome, or higher order aggregates of such components. Indeed, biology appears to be organized in a modular fashion. This is clear in the sense of structure, with examples such as the structure of catalytic units (enzymes), confinement units (membranous vesicles), and inheritable information (chromatin). It is less clear perhaps in the sense of units of function such as metabolic pathways, endocytosis and division. Yet, if only to make understanding by the human mind possible, systems biology also aims to understand cell function in terms of those well- and ill-defined higher order modules.