Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica

Systems biology is a term used to describe a number of trends in bioscience research, and a movement which draws on those trends. Proponents describe systems biology as a biology-based inter-disciplinary study field that focuses on complex interactions in biological systems, claiming that it uses a new perspective. Systems-level research involves producing heterogeneous, global data that represent different levels of biological information. This typically entails measuring differences in gene copy number, gene and protein expression, and differences in other biological events. Generating the data, then, is not a difficult thing in recent biological study. The key bottleneck is the lack of bioinformatics solutions that allow researchers to perform integrative data analysis necessary for the identification of linkages and concordance between the different levels of information. “Systems biology is in the eye of the beholder” says Leroy Hood, president and co-founder of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle. Systems biology, a field that has grown dramatically in the past 10 years, focuses on analyzing how the components of a biological system interact to produce the behavior of that system. Here I present a review, with an emphasis on 10 years what we have done in NCKU.