Systems biology under the microscope
By: Nuala Moran
01 December 2007
You can't capture the thrill and excitement of a football match by describing the individual players. Similarly, it is not possible to understand biological processes and pathways by looking just at the component parts.
“Biology is a science of interactions and complexity. Looking at its individual components doesn't tell you about the system as a whole,” says Corrado Priami, President and CEO of the Microsoft Research- University of Trento Centre for Computational and Systems Biology.
In the past 40 years the reductionist techniques of molecular biology have provided deep insights into thousands of individual actors – membranes, hormones, enzymes, genes, and their associated kinetics – that are involved in the functioning of organisms. But biological systems do not respond in particular way because of one particular component or another. “They behave in a given way due to the interaction of components,” says Priami.
Prof. Corrado Priami, President and CEO, Microsoft Research/University of Trento Center for Computational and Systems Biology
But understanding this requires a fundamental shift towards viewing biology as an information science. Seen from this perspective, computer science and systems biology share the same conceptual challenges. “They both need to handle complex systems that are inherently highly parallel,” says Priami.
The prospect is that one discipline will feed off the other: understanding the parallelism of biology will be used to build better tools in computer science. The ultimate vision is to use living systems as computers: in effect, organisms are processing systems with all the essential properties of a highly efficient computer.
The focus of Priami's own research is this convergence of life sciences and computer science. The aim is to develop new computational tools to enhance understanding of the evolutionary processes that are responsible for the large scale properties and dynamics of biological systems. Concurrently, he is building a better understanding of how biological systems process information. This reverse engineering is underpinning the development of new, more powerful, more reliable programming languages that will be used to develop the software of the future.
“We are trying to exploit computer science as an enabling technology to enhance life science at large, and capitalise on the new knowledge to enhance computer science,” says Priami. This then, is the vision. At a practical level systems biology involves many different disciplines. “And once you have built a multidisciplinary team you need a common language – different sciences use different words to talk about the same thing,” said Priami. A further implication is that the basic model of research has to change. “It should be targeted and interdisciplinary – and you should make it iterative, not linear.” Research also needs to be ‘communicative' - we need to disseminate the results in the broader community to help enhance the visibility of science and to facilitate decisions to invest money in research.”