Postal address:

Molecular biology and all the biomedical sciences are undergoing a true rev-olution as a result of the emergence and growing impact of a series of new disciplines and tools sharing the ’-omics ’ suffix in their name. These include in particular genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics, devoted re-spectively to the examination of the entire systems of genes, transcripts, proteins and metabolites present in a given cell or tissue type. The availability of these new, highly effective tools for biological exploration is dramatically changing the way one performs research in at least two respects. First, the amount of available experimental data is not a limiting factor any more; on the contrary, there is a plethora of it. Given the research question, the challenge has shifted towards identifying the relevant pieces of information and making sense out of it (a ’data mining ’ issue). Second, rather than focus on components in isolation, we can now try to understand how biological systems behave as a result of the integration and interaction between the individual components that one can now monitor simultaneously, so called ’systems biology’