Systems Biology: Scaling up to a Simple Cell

Systems biology is the catch all phrase for the biology of interactions.  More specifically, it is the study of the complex interaction of many levels of biological information - genomic DNA, mRNA, proteins, functional proteins, informational pathways and informational networks--to understand how they work together.  And this is just within a cell.  Systems biology will scale from here to organs, to organism physiology, and finally to the entire body as a network of interactions. 

With the human genome project as the blue print, the race to understand the interactions within the human proteome is underway.  The genome-proteome networks currently under analysis are important in understanding a cell's slower process, such as governing which genetic programs should be executed.  More difficult will be deciphering how faster processes which occur among proteins, like the cascades that convey messages from outside the cell to the DNA in its nucleus.  Understanding protein-protein interactions is an integral part of the next generation of medical technology. 

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Converging Forces: The Edge of Molecular Computing

For all the hype that nanotechnology will continue to receive, advancements in the nano-material sciences will represent another step function in computational power and memory.  As Don Eigler noted "We've come, in about 12 or 13 years, from discovering that we had an instrument that was just barely capable of imaging atoms and then moving atoms to functional logical circuitry." The rate at which basic research reaches commerical potential continues to be reduced, while consistent manufacturing of nano-sized circuits will make Moore's law look like a slow ramp, and will contribute greatly to the advances throughout the biological revolution.

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