What is modeling and simulation of biological networks?
Molecular biology has undergone a dramatic revolution during the second half of the twentieth century, beginning with the discovery of the structure of DNA. Since then a series of technological advances has given experimentalists the ability to make ever-more
detailed measurements of an increasing number of molecular
components of the cell. DNA microarrays, for instance, are small
silicon chips spotted with short segments of DNA that can be used
to measure the activity levels of thousands of different genes in
tissue samples simultaneously.
Soon it might be possible to make large-scale quantitative measurements in a single cell. Being able to take such global snapshots of molecular processes has opened up the possibility of studying the changes that are constantly going on in cells as a coherent dynamical system with intricately interacting parts, rather than studying the parts in isolation. Similar developments in other fields of biology have revolutionized the availability of system wide data. Thus, the new field of systems biology has emerged. It makes heavy use of mathematical tools for modeling and simulation.
