Computational and Systems Biology

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.

The current challenges that we as computational and systems biologists face are to (a) develop new methods and algorithms to handle the large amounts of biological information that is being generated, (b) make specific discoveries by mining and analysing this data, (c) develop mathematical models of biological systems with predictive power and (d) uncover general principles of biological systems by integrating diverse types of information from different organisms. The papers published in this themed issue address these challenges. This issue contains articles that employ traditional computational approaches such as sequence, structure, expression and comparative genomic analysis and report specific discoveries and general principles of cellular systems. It also contains papers that use contemporary computational and systems approaches that involve analysis of biological networks mediated by proteins, nucleic acids and small molecules to describe system level properties of such complex biological networks. The papers cover a spectrum of scientific subjects ranging from transcription, translation and gene expression to signalling, metabolomics, chemical genomics and network biology. Finally, the articles investigate data from a wide-range of model organisms, ranging from viruses to prokaryotes to multicellular organisms, including human, and reports general principles that are likely to be applicable to a number of other biological systems.

We foresee that technological advancements will result in a deluge of high-throughput data from new and established model organisms for many years to come. Hence computational and systems approaches to investigate biological problems are likely to become indispensable. Therefore such approaches, which are inter-disciplinary in nature, have the potential to lay the foundation for and accelerate further studies in modern biology. We hope that the findings, reviews and approaches presented in the various papers of this issue will serve as an inspiration for many involved in this area of research and that you will enjoy reading the papers.

M. Madan Babu, PhD

Editorial Board, Molecular BioSystems

Group Leader, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK

Fellow of Darwin College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

Hirotada Mori, PhD

Editorial Board, Molecular BioSystems

Professor, Institute for Advanced Biosciences, Keio University, Japan.

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