Chapter 10 - Systems and network biology

Abstract

Biology has evolved into a data-intensive science. As a result, biology and computer science today operate well together and are interconnected through other scientific disciplines such as statistics, mathematics, biophysics, and biochemistry. The combination of this diverse knowledge has led to the creation of big-data research, network biology, and other developing biological paradigms. For instance, network biology helps us understand the parts and functions of cells and subcells at the system level. Frequently, network biology is also referred to as systems biology. The purpose of this field is to comprehend organisms or cells at multiple functional and mechanistic levels as a group. Currently, systems biology faces the challenge of interpreting massive quantities of molecular biomedical data and massive biological networks. The key to comprehending complex systems is to comprehend the topology of the molecular interaction networks and to identify the molecules that play crucial structural and regulatory roles. Now that the price of next-generation sequencing is going down, researchers can regularly make a list of the molecular parts of these networks across the whole genome and under many different conditions. In this chapter, we'll talk about how network biology provides a powerful way to look for patterns in genomic data by studying different types of biological networks, how they can be used to decode important biological information, and the tools that are currently available for analyzing and visualizing biological networks.