Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
FIGURE 23.5
The 'holy trinity of biology' where biology drives technology drives computational/mathematical tools. Practicing this ideal requires
a cross-disciplinary environment where scientists of many different disciplines (see lower right-hand side of figure) learn to speak the languages of the other
scientists and to work together in teams. When the holy trinity is practiced effectively enormous amounts of biological information can be generated rapidly.
FIGURE 23.6
A schematic of the prion accumulation and replication network in the prion-induced mouse neurodegenerative disease. The red
indicates transcript levels that have been increased in the brains from prion-infected animals compared with normal control brains. The yellow indicates
transcripts that are the same in control and diseased animals. The three panels represent the network at 2, 12 and 20 weeks in animals that live about 22
weeks with this disease. The disease-perturbed networks appear about eight weeks before the clinical signs appear in these animals.
multiple scientific disciplines and how towork together in
biology-driven teams practicing the holy trinity in the
context of specific big or small science problems. This
systems-driven infrastructure is what the Institute for
Systems Biology (ISB) has spent the first 10 years of its
existence creating
[24]
.
3.
Experimental systems approaches to disease andwellness
are holistic. To decipher biological complexity, systems
medicine depends on generating global and comprehen-
sive data sets, following the dynamics of disease-per-
turbed networks across disease initiation and progression.
Ultimately integrating diverse data types together to
create predictive and actionable models (
Figure 23.6
)
[2,24,25]
. Thus systems medicine will give fundamental
new insights into disease mechanisms
and open new
opportunities for diagnosis, therapy and prevention.
The idea of systems biology can be illustrated by the
example of how a radio converts radio waves into sound
waves
[26]
. It is clear that merely understanding the
function of each individual radio component would not
provide us with an understanding of how radio waves are
converted into soundwaves. The same principle applies to
e
