Computational and Systems Biology

Abstract

Over the last few decades, we have all witnessed an explosion in the amount and diversity of information that describes various living systems, including humans. This ranges from the availability of the complete genome sequence of over a thousand organisms to datasets describing expression levels of thousands of transcripts across different conditions to networks of interactions between different biological molecules. Thus it is clear that we are now in an exciting time in biology where the availability of such data permits us to investigate fundamental questions of a different magnitude and kind that are complementary to conventional approaches. This diversity in problems that one can currently address is well illustrated by the articles published in this themed issue of Molecular BioSystems entitled ''Computational and Systems Biology''. The excitement in this area and the scientific community is reflected in the fact that this special issue consists of over 50 papers with 19 reviews and 32 original research articles.

Methodology of network pharmacology for research on Chinese herbal medicine against COVID-19: A review

“… [73] GOATOOLS https://github.com/tanghaibao/goatools A Python-based library, making it more efficient to stay current with the latest ontologies and annotations; performs gene ontology enrichment analyses to determine over- and under-represented terms, and organizes results for greater clarity and easier interpretation using a novel GOATOOLS GO grouping method. [4] _ENREF_80 PANTHER http://pantherdb.org A multifaceted data resource for classification of protein sequences by evolutionary history, and by function. [75] Metascape http://metascape.org/ A web-based portal designed to provide a comprehensive gene list annotation and analysis resource for experimental biologists, including functional enrichment, interactome analysis, gene annotation, and membership search.…”

“…Systems biology is a new frontier in biological research which provides a framework for assembling models of biological systems from systematic measurements. Further, bioinformatics is conceptualizing biology from a molecular perspective and applying “informatics techniques,” including applied mathematics, computer science and statistics, to extract knowledge from biological data for large-scale analysis, prediction, imaging and visualization [4] . Cheminformatics is an emerging frontier in the field of information technology, focusing on the collection, storage, analysis and operation of chemical data [5] .…”