Metabolic networks: Structure and utilization

Abstract

During the last century we have witnessed a dramatic progress in the natural sciences. Most of the developments can be directly related to the reductionist approach, which presumes that the often complex behavior of a system can be predicted and understood from the detailed knowledge of the system's (often identical) elementary constituents. However, it is by now clear that our ability to understand simple fundamental laws governing the individual "building blocks" is a far cry from being able to predict the overall behavior of a complex system (Anderson, 1972). Furthermore, for most complex systems there exists a considerable variation in the nature of both the elementary building blocks and their interactions requiring novel methods capable of analyzing and predicting their large-scale behavior. © 2005 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. All rights reserved.