Systems and Synthetic Biology

Abstract

Systems biology is a field of biology that was propelled into existence due to the development of methods to generate massively parallel experimental biological data, starting with genome sequencing projects approximately 30 years ago. Transcending the focus on single biological components, the goal of systems biology is to reverseengineermechanisms of biological systems to enhance our quantitative holistic understanding of biology and to translate this understanding to applications such as novel therapeutic approaches. As such, systems biology is the science counterpart to synthetic biology described below. A hallmark of biological systems is their sheer complexity, as evidenced by the existence of thousands of components and millions of interactions between them even in the simplest of living cells. While this degree of complexity is paralleled by some engineered systems, the other hallmark, large uncertainty, distinguishes biological systems from their human-made counterparts. In addition to complexity, limited observability, lower accuracy of measurements, and uncertain mechanisms make reverse-engineering in biology highly challenging.