Definitions for "Systems Biology"
The field of biology that treats biological systems as entities of study rather than researching the roles of individual molecules in health and disease. Systems biology utilizes a combination of biochemistry, proteomics, genomics, metabolomics and bioinformatics to better understand the contribution of each element within a system to the whole. In proteomics and cancer, perturbations in the protein component of signal transduction systems, for example, can lead to cell and tissue changes that promote tumorigenesis, therefore understanding the entire signal transduction system can often reveal drug targets that would otherwise have been overlooked.
The study of the mechanisms underlying complex biological processes as integrated systems of many, diverse, interacting components. Systems biology involves (1) collection of large sets of experimental data (by high-throughput technologies and/or by mining the literature of reductionist molecular biology and biochemistry), (2) proposal of mathematical models that might account for at least some significant aspects of this data set, (3) accurate computer solution of the mathematical equations to obtain numerical predictions, and (4) assessment of the quality of the model by comparing numerical simulations with the experimental data.
The study of the dynamic networks of interacting biological elements. (R Aebersold. Institute for Molecular Systems Biology, Zürich, Switzerland)