Understanding Principles of the Dynamic Biochemical Networks of Life Through Systems Biology

Systems Biology brings the potential to discover fundamental principles of Life that cannot be discovered by considering individual molecules. This chapter discusses a number of early, more recent, and upcoming discoveries of such network principles. These range from the balancing of fluxes through metabolic networks, the potential of those networks for truly individualized medicine, the time dependent control of fluxes and concentrations in metabolism and signal transduction, the ways in which organisms appear to regulate metabolic processes vis-à -vis limitations therein, tradeoffs in robustness and fragility, and a relation between robustness and time dependences in the cell cycle. The robustness considerations will lead to the issue whether and how evolution has been able to put in place design principles of control engineering such as infinite robustness and perfect adaptation in the hierarchical biochemical networks of cell biology © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved