An Overview of Systems Biology

This chapter provides an overview of three crucial aspects of systems biology: constructing biological networks, analyzing and modelling the structure of biological networks and modelling the dynamics of biological networks. We describe the types of intracellular networks most often studied, and the 'omic' information available to synthesize these networks, with a special focus on plant biology. We review the computational methods used to construct or infer (reverse engineer) intracellular networks. We present the graph-theoretical measures most useful for understanding the organization of biological networks, from the single node level to the global properties of the whole network. A representative sample of biological network models is provided, ranging from static models to dynamic models that incorporate how the status of the nodes changes in time. Throughout the chapter we focus on the biological predictions possible by combining experimental, theoretical and computational methods.