Perspective: Systems biology beyond biology

Abstract

The past decades have witnessed an astounding rise of the nascent field of systems biology. By and large unknown or ignored for a long time, the field rapidly moved into the limelight and is now in the process of becoming a widely recognized and respected component of mainstream biology. Of course, much remains to be explored and accomplished in systems biology within its parent domain of biology, but the time seems ripe for expansions beyond this domain. The goal of such an expansion should not be the creation of new strongholds or academic silos outside biology, but the true integration of biological systems thinking into educational programs of other disciplines. The expansion should naturally start with closely related fields like biophysics, biochemistry, bioinformatics, and bioengineering, but should continue further into other areas invested in the study of life, such as medicine, epidemiology, and public health, as well as applied mathematics and computer science. This perspective sketches out how systems biological thinking might enrich the training of a new generation of scientists in different fields of scientific endeavor.

What’s next for computational systems biology?

“…Systems biology has matured to a point where it is widely accepted among biologists. While this acceptance is without doubt a major achievement, we cannot rest but must share our excitement about the new field with the outside world (Voit, 2022). Over the time horizon of the next decade or two, this publicity will not be a luxury but an absolute necessity, because it is not our peers but the public, represented by politicians, that is funding our work through taxes.…”

Editorial: Expert Opinions in Network bioinformatics: 2022

“…The phrase “systems biology” was first used in relation to a symposium in 1968 by Mesarović ( Systems Symposium and Mesarović, Mihajlo D, and Case Institute of Technology and Mesarovic, 1968 ). As Voit states in a recent perspective article that also traces the birth of systems biology ( Voit, 2022 ), the insiders had begun to realize that computational methods were required to fully realize the concepts and promise of systems biology. These methods would have to specifically deal with biological phenomena as complex, adaptive, and dynamic systems.…”

“… Voit (2022) identified four aspects which drove a gradual shift from the reductionist approach to the system-level approach in biology and consequently in computational biology. The first two were the impending completion of the entire human genome project and the burgeoning and rapidly expanding availability of high-throughput technologies that created unprecedentedly huge amounts of molecular data ( Altaf-Ul-Amin et al, 2014 ).…”

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Network biology is often referred to as systems biology. Systems biology is a fresh interpretation of established ideas (Voit, 2022). Several researchers started to develop methods that would allow representing and analyzing nonlinear models of, in theory, arbitrarily complex systems.

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