Centre for Computational and Systems Biology

Systems Biology studies the relationships and interactions between parts of biological systems (such as gene and protein networks, metabolic pathways, and the immune system) by combining knowledge from molecular biology with high-throughput techniques. The main goal is to comprehend the functionality of a biological system as a whole (with a special interest in emergent properties) and, eventually, to develop a functional model of it. By abstracting biological systems on the level of their behaviours, we obtain models sharing many characteristics with computational systems. Thus, on all levels of organisation, from the atomic to full organisms, we are faced with concurrency (simultaneous behaviours), event-driven, causal, time-dependent and distributed behaviours. In this context, modelling (e.g., reverse-engineering, simulating and analysing) a biological system is considered in a similar way to the engineering of complex artificial systems [8,11]. The challenge is to construct, in silico, reliable `copies ' of biological systems that allow us to simulate various experiments and can assist us in proposing and verifying hypotheses that might be impossible by conventional means. Recent small-scale modelling efforts in this direction have had encouraging results [30,19,13]. Mathematical models of biological processe