Systems Biology: Volume 1: Genomics

Systems Biology is a powerful new computational approach to studying complex living systems. Unlike traditional biology that examines single genes or proteins in isolation, systems biology simultaneously explores the complex interaction of many levels of interaction, leading to a new understanding of how they work together.

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Familiar sciences of biology, physics, chemistry, cybernetics, and computational methods for dealing with vast new data sets of information at molecular and sub-molecular levels are morphing into new sciences. Some exist beneath our line of sight where laws of nature hover between Newtonian and quantum mechanics. New fields of cyber-, bio-, nanotechnology and systems biology raise arcane new concepts. The completed human genome has led to an explosion of interest in genetics and molecular biology. The view of the genome as a network of interacting computational components is well established and here writers explore it in new ways.

These systemic approaches are timely in light of the availability of an increasing number of genomic sequences, and the generation of large volumes of biological data by high-throughput methods. Suitable for two-semesters of study, the works surveys genomics principles in the 13 chapters of Vol I, and networks and models in the 14 chapters of Vol II. Both, as a two-book set, will serve as core foundation titles for Dennis Shasha's Series in Systems Biology, establishing the principles and challenges for this emerging field of study. In each chapter world-renowned experts trail-blazing in their respective fields will review corresponding topics as well as current and planned research. Chapters will treat the integrated study and analysis of biological systems by use of data and information about the system components in their entirety, as opposed to the study of individual components in isolation.

Systems Biology courses are popping up all over the place and biology, computer science, and bioinformatics programs are the primary potential takers. The editors plan books for a very wide audience, at the same time providing a comprehensive repository of up-to-date overviews and predictions for a number of inter-related sub-fields within this hierarchy. Intended readers include graduate students plus academic and professional researchers of genomics, bioinformatics, molecular biology, biochemistry, bioengineering, and computer systemic approaches to those fields.
By comparison, Shasha's first Systems Biology Series title, Amos's Cellular Biology, is a book for technologists using biology as a vehicle to do something else, whereas this is a book about systems and related technologies in service to biologists. The volume editors plan to review or have reviewed, and to edit the invited chapters for content and consistent conceptual level, each chapter contributing uniquely to the key aspects of the Systems Biology hierarchy. A few chapter contents may date after two years, but the majority will endure for longer-term reference use because they treat methodologies and provide sample applications.