Modular organization and emergence in systems biology

Abstract

Understanding, how cellular functions emerge from the interaction of biological components, is the main goal of systems biology. Here, we review the relevance of amodular organization and the emergence of collective dynamical states in systems biology and show that the concept of networks (i.e., the representation of biological systems in terms of nodes and links) allows us to formally define modularity and to quantitatively assess the impact of modularity on the emergent dynamical behaviors.