Foundations of Systems Biology in Engineering — Overview

Systems Biology has emerged in recent years as an exciting new endeavour which aims at achieving a systems-level understanding of biological processes – and ultimatively whole cells and organisms. The effort provides a new approach for integrating quantitative data from a variety of sources, especially from genome-wide analyses, in conjunction with extensive use of mathematical models for data analysis as well as for model driven data acquisition. Progress in systems biology is heavily dependent on a combination of experimental and computational state-of-the-art techniques.

To live up to the high expectations, Systems Biology tools, both experimental and theoretical, have to be continuously and significantly improved. Thus reaching a comprehensive understanding of the behaviour of cells, organs or even whole organisms has to be seen as a long term goal. The present hurdles to be mastered are mechanistic descriptions of spatiotemporal dynamics of signal and metabolic processes at a cellular level and their functional interrelations. The promise of such dynamic models is not only a comprehensive understanding of complex biological processes but the immediate application of this advanced knowledge for practical purposes in biotechnology and medicine. In particular, the exploitation of mathematical models for identification of drug targets, optimization of drug dosages, improvement of biotechnical production processes and for advancing synthetic biology, i.e. man-designed biological systems, as a new field at the interface between engineering and systems biology becomes apparent.

All these subjects provide the focus of FOSBE 2007 (Foundation of Systems Biology in Engineering), which is the second in a series of conferences offered by the CACHE organisation to address the emerging challenges in the field of Systems Biology.