2 Analysis and Data Integration

Systems biology is a modern approach to understanding global processes, analogous to looking at the “big picture” of biology. This approach is helpful for describing simple cause-and-effect biological responses to specific stimuli but also allows the identification of further secondary and tertiary interactions forming biologically relevant networks. Such an ambitious goal requires a multidisciplinary strategy involving different techniques, which generate heterogeneous types of data that need to be integrated with new emerging knowledge in order to describe the whole system. This was an unrealistic goal until recently but with modern high throughput methodologies and sophisticated computational techniques it is becoming possible to integrate new experimental information with current biological knowledge to address the most complex biological questions. The challenge of the systems biology approach is to integrate heterogeneous information across different spatial and temporal scales of the biological systems. This represents a change in research style from a hypothesis driven to a data-driven approach. In some ways a systems biology approach requires a change of mentality, in order to feel comfortable with a degree of uncertainty while waiting for the data required to solve the problem.