Systems Biology: A New Frontier in Science

Systems biology is an emerging field with the potential of making significant contribution to human life and other living organisms. It helps to understand the entirety of life and elucidates basic principles behind the biological life. It captures the complexity of complex biological system and explains the relationship between every gene, transcript, protein, and phenotype. Advancements in functional and structural genomics have enabled the molecular biologists to come a long way toward understanding molecular constituents of the cell. Yet, we fail to understand how organisms function. To date, we face lot of problems in complete understating of several diseases caused to plants, animals, and other productive organisms. To understand underlying biological processes and to find out potential new drug targets, we need to understand complete molecular network systems. Systems biology is an approach based on interdisciplinary fields which focuses on systematic study of complex biological systems using new perspective of holism instead of conventional reductionism. Systems biology follows a holistic approach to understand life by using interactomics, genomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics, proteomics, and informational science. In this chapter, we explained different components of systems biology and its connections with other disciplines. In the future, this integrated science can answer several devastating diseases and mysteries in biological systems. They can be readily tested by computer based models.