Reverse engineering the cell

摘要

Borrowing ideas that were originally developed to study electronic circuits, two reports decipher how yeast reacts to changes in its environment by analysing the organism's responses to oscillating input signals. Systems biology has certainly caught peoples attention. But when pressed to define precisely what it is, let alone how it will complement classic reductionist approaches, concrete answers can be hard to find. One immediate, practical contribution of systems biology is that it suggests new ways of interrogating cellular responses to stimuli, and provides a framework for understanding the results.