CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY Eleni Anthippi Chatzimichali ...

1 Introduction and Literature Review
1.1 Introduction
1.1.1 Overview of Systems Biology
Breakthrough biological discoveries over the past decades, such as the revolutionary
discovery of the double helix structure of DNA in 1953 by Watson and Crick,
catalysed the blossoming of molecular biology (Watson and Crick, 1953). Acquiring
information about the structure and properties of DNA and proteins led to outstanding
progress in the years that followed as presented in Figure 1-1. Molecular biology has
chiefly focused on identifying and investigating individual biological molecules by
studying their properties and functions either as isolated entities or as small sets of
components in very simple model systems. However, the reductionist approach
adapted by molecular biology was not sufficient to interpret the intrinsic complexity
of biological systems.
The Human Genome Project has profoundly altered the practice and view of
contemporary biology (Hood, 2003; Venter et al., 2001). In the post-genome era, the
massive amount of biological data acquired by the advance of high-throughput
technologies led to the rapid shift of interest towards systems biology. The marked
increase in the amount of genomic, proteomic and metabolomic data due to the
constant improvements in high-throughput tools, has granted the scientific community
the opportunity to study complex biological systems as an integrated whole. Thus,
systems biology emerged as a necessity helping us understand these complex system
dynamics, as these are the key to understanding life. Systems analysis has historically
been applied in a plethora of scientific fields such as economics, physics, psychology
and most recently biology, covering a multitude of different areas such as
developmental biology, ecology and immunology (Westerhoff et al., 2004).
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