Fundamentals of Systems Biology: From Synthetic Circuits to Whole-cell Models (Paperback)

For decades biology has focused on decoding cellular processes one gene at a time, but many of the most pressing biological questions, as well as diseases such as cancer and heart disease, are related to complex systems involving the interaction of hundreds, or even thousands, of gene products and other factors. How do we begin to understand this complexity?

Fundamentals of Systems Biology: From Synthetic Circuits to Whole-cell Models introduces students to methods they can use to tackle complex systems head-on, carefully walking them through studies that comprise the foundation and frontier of systems biology. The first section of the book focuses on bringing students quickly up to speed with a variety of modeling methods in the context of a synthetic biological circuit. This innovative approach builds intuition about the strengths and weaknesses of each method and becomes critical in the book’s second half, where much more complicated network models are addressed—including transcriptional, signaling, metabolic, and even integrated multi-network models.

The approach makes the work much more accessible to novices (undergraduates, medical students, and biologists new to mathematical modeling) while still having much to offer experienced modelers--whether their interests are microbes, organs, whole organisms, diseases, synthetic biology, or just about any field that investigates living systems.

數十年來，生物學一直專注於逐個基因解碼細胞過程，但許多最迫切的生物學問題，以及癌症和心臟病等疾病，涉及到數百甚至數千個基因產物和其他因素的複雜系統的相互作用。我們如何開始理解這種複雜性？

《系統生物學基礎：從合成電路到整個細胞模型》介紹了學生可以用來應對複雜系統的方法，並仔細介紹了構成系統生物學基礎和前沿的研究。該書的第一部分專注於在合成生物電路的背景下迅速使學生熟悉各種建模方法。這種創新的方法有助於對每種方法的優點和缺點建立直覺，並在書的後半部分變得至關重要，該部分涉及更加複雜的網絡模型，包括轉錄、信號、代謝甚至整合的多網絡模型。

這種方法使得初學者（本科生、醫學生和對數學建模新手的生物學家）更容易理解這項工作，同時對有經驗的建模者仍然有很多價值-無論他們的興趣是微生物、器官、整個生物體、疾病、合成生物學還是任何研究生命系統的領域。