Systems biology? Just do it!
Systems biology is booming but its proponents are struggling to come up with a concise definition of the discipline. Do they really need one?
Systems biology initiatives are springing up all over the place. Some recent examples include the three planned centres for systems biology at the universities of Edinburgh, Oxford and Nottingham. The UK's Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council will fund them to the tune of 27 million pounds. Their work will apply broad multidisciplinary approaches to dynamic biological systems. The same concept has already been established in three other centres for systems biology in London, Manchester and Newcastle. Here, work is focussed on host-pathogen interaction, yeast and the ageing cell respectively.
The Centre for Systems Biology at Edinburgh will bring together researchers from informatics, molecular plant sciences, medicine and cell biology to model dynamic biological systems including circadian rhythms, RNA metabolism and the interferon pathway. The Centre for Plant Integrative Biology at the University of Nottingham aims to develop a virtual root that will serve as an exemplar for models of other multicellular systems. And, lastly, the Oxford Integrative Systems Biology Centre will look at the complex network of pathways that single cell organisms use to control their behaviour, with the aim of generating predictive models of biological networks.
Further proof, if any were needed, that systems biology is attracting big research money can be found on continental Europe. Here, the European Union is funding five different systems biology networks under the current Research Framework Program 6 (FP6). The German Ministry for Research and Education (BMBF) is spending 50 million euros on a systems biology initiative that it started in 2003. The Academy of Finland and Finland's National Technology Agency, Tekes, have begun a joint systems biology initiative for which 9 million Euro has been earmarked. This could be the tip of the iceberg.
But what is systems biology? Amazingly, this is a hard question to answer, as the discipline is still struggling to define itself. One definition, for example, holds that "Systems biology addresses the analysis of entire biological systems. This entails an interdisciplinary approach and the investigation of all the components and networks contributing to a system." However, with all the current technical advances and possibilities left aside - does this definition really represent a new approach to biology? A sizeable minority believe that systems biology is nothing but a new and catchy name for what non-reductionist biologists (or physiologists) have always been trying to do. It was not surprising, then, when Ruedi Aebersold, one of the pioneers of the discipline, recently concluded in an editorial for the journal
Molecular Systems Biology that "A concise definition of systems biology that most of us can agree upon has yet to emerge."
But how important is this? If we jettison all the name-and-definition-stuff for the moment, one thing remains: many people that feel that it could now be possible to tackle the analysis of entire biological systems in all their complexity by applying a whole range of very powerful new methods. These methods feature, for example, automation and highthroughput analysis as well as ever more powerful computers and algorithms.
Moreover these people seem to be very motivated. So if they can get the money, why not let them try - even if they cannot consistently define their discipline at the moment, and regardless of whether systems biology basically might be nothing more than a new and catchy name for an old concept. Finally, they will create data, probably very valuable data. And after all, data don't care about the concepts and names under which they have been created.
Ralf Neumann
