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Addressing the emergence of life from a systems biology perspective, this new edition has undergone extensive revision, reflecting changes in scientific understanding and evolution of thought on the question 'what is life?'. With an emphasis on the philosophical aspects of science, including the epistemic features of modern synthetic biology, and also providing an updated view of the autopoiesis/cognition theory, the book gives an exhaustive treatment of the biophysical properties of vesicles, seen as the beginning of the 'road map' to the minimal cell - a road map which will develop into the question of whether and to what extent synthetic biology will be capable of making minimal life in the laboratory. Fully illustrated, accessibly written, directly challenging the reader with provocative questions, offering suggestions for research proposals, and including dialogues with contemporary authors such as Humberto Maturana, Albert Eschenmoser and Harold Morowitz, this is an ideal resource for researchers and students across fields including bioengineering, evolutionary biology, molecular biology, chemistry and chemical engineering.
This new color edition of Braun and Murdoch's bestselling textbook integrates use of the RStudio platform and adds discussion of newer graphics systems, extensive exploration of Markov chain Monte Carlo, expert advice on common error messages, motivating applications of matrix decompositions, and numerous new examples and exercises. This is the only introduction needed to start programming in R, the computing standard for analyzing data. Co-written by an R core team member and an established R author, this book comes with real R code that complies with the standards of the language. Unlike other introductory books on the R system, this book emphasizes programming, including the principles that apply to most computing languages, and techniques used to develop more complex projects. Solutions, datasets, and any errata are available from the book's website. The many examples, all from real applications, make it particularly useful for anyone working in practical data analysis.
Living systems are dynamic and extremely complex and their behaviour is often hard to predict by studying their individual parts. Systems biology promises to reveal and analyse these highly connected, regulated and adaptable systems, using mathematical modelling and computational analysis. This new systems approach is already having a broad impact on biological research and has potentially far-reaching implications for our understanding of life. Written in an informal and non-technical style, this book provides an accessible introduction to systems biology. Self-contained vignettes each convey a key theme and are intended to enlighten, provoke and interest readers of different academic disciplines, but also to offer new insight to those working in the field. Using a minimum amount of jargon and no mathematics, Voit manages to convey complex ideas and give the reader a genuine sense of the excitement that systems biology brings with it, as well as the current challenges and opportunities.
This sophisticated package of statistical methods is for advanced master's (MPH) and PhD students in public health and epidemiology who are involved in the analysis of data. It makes the link from statistical theory to data analysis, focusing on the methods and data types most common in public health and related fields. Like most toolboxes, the statistical tools in this book are organized into sections with similar objectives. Unlike most toolboxes, however, these tools are accompanied by complete instructions, explanations, detailed examples, and advice on relevant issues and potential pitfalls - conveying skills, intuition, and experience. The only prerequisite is a first-year statistics course and familiarity with a computing package such as R, Stata, SPSS, or SAS. Though the book is not tied to a particular computing language, its figures and analyses were all created using R. Relevant R code, data sets, and links to public data sets are available from www.cambridge.org/9781107113084.
In most modern biomedical research projects, application of high-throughput genomic, proteomic, and transcriptomic experiments has gradually become an inevitable component. Popular technologies include microarray, next generation sequencing, mass spectrometry and proteomics assays. As the technologies have become mature and the price affordable, omics data are rapidly generated, and the problem of information integration and modeling of multi-lab and/or multi-omics data is becoming a growing one in the bioinformatics field. This book provides comprehensive coverage of these topics and will have a long-lasting impact on this evolving subject. Each chapter, written by a leader in the field, introduces state-of-the-art methods to handle information integration, experimental data, and database problems of omics data.
Whereas genetic studies have traditionally focused on explaining heritance of single traits and their phenotypes, recent technological advances have made it possible to comprehensively dissect the genetic architecture of complex traits and quantify how genes interact to shape phenotypes. This exciting new area has been termed systems genetics and is born out of a synthesis of multiple fields, integrating a range of approaches and exploiting our increased ability to obtain quantitative and detailed measurements on a broad spectrum of phenotypes. Gathering the contributions of leading scientists, both computational and experimental, this book shows how experimental perturbations can help us to understand the link between genotype and phenotype. A snapshot of current research activity and state-of-the-art approaches to systems genetics are provided, including work from model organisms such as Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Drosophila melanogaster, as well as from human studies.
With over two hundred types of cancer diagnosed to date, researchers the world over have been forced to rapidly update their understanding of the biology of cancer. In fact, only the study of the basic cellular processes, and how these are altered in cancer cells, can ultimately provide a background for rational therapies. Bringing together the state-of-the-art contributions of international experts, Systems Biology of Cancer proposes an ultimate research goal for the whole scientific community: exploiting systems biology to generate in-depth knowledge based on blueprints that are unique to each type of cancer. Readers are provided with a realistic view of what is known and what is yet to be uncovered on the aberrations in the fundamental biological processes, deregulation of major signaling networks, alterations in major cancers and the strategies for using the scientific knowledge for effective diagnosis, prognosis and drug discovery to improve public health.
Recent technological advances have enabled comprehensive determination of the molecular composition of living cells. The chemical interactions between many of these molecules are known, giving rise to genome-scale reconstructed biochemical reaction networks underlying cellular functions. Mathematical descriptions of the totality of these chemical interactions lead to genome-scale models that allow the computation of physiological functions. Reflecting these recent developments, this textbook explains how such quantitative and computable genotype-phenotype relationships are built using a genome-wide basis of information about the gene portfolio of a target organism. It describes how biological knowledge is assembled to reconstruct biochemical reaction networks, the formulation of computational models of biological functions, and how these models can be used to address key biological questions and enable predictive biology. Developed through extensive classroom use, the book is designed to provide students with a solid conceptual framework and an invaluable set of modeling tools and computational approaches.
Reflecting the major advances that have been made in the field over the past decade, this book provides an overview of current models of biological systems. The focus is on simple quantitative models, highlighting their role in enhancing our understanding of the strategies of gene regulation and dynamics of information transfer along signalling pathways, as well as in unravelling the interplay between function and evolution. The chapters are self-contained, each describing key methods for studying the quantitative aspects of life through the use of physical models. They focus, in particular, on connecting the dynamics of proteins and DNA with strategic decisions on the larger scale of a living cell, using E. coli and phage lambda as key examples. Encompassing fields such as quantitative molecular biology, systems biology and biophysics, this book will be a valuable tool for students from both biological and physical science backgrounds.
Nobel laureate Erwin Schrödinger's What is Life? is one of the great science classics of the twentieth century. It was written for the layman, but proved to be one of the spurs to the birth of molecular biology and the subsequent discovery of DNA. What is Life? appears here together with Mind and Matter, his essay investigating a relationship which has eluded and puzzled philosophers since the earliest times. Brought together with these two classics are Schrödinger's autobiographical sketches, which offer a fascinating account of his life as a background to his scientific writings.
Over the past thirty years, a new systemic conception of life has emerged at the forefront of science. New emphasis has been given to complexity, networks, and patterns of organisation, leading to a novel kind of 'systemic' thinking. This volume integrates the ideas, models, and theories underlying the systems view of life into a single coherent framework. Taking a broad sweep through history and across scientific disciplines, the authors examine the appearance of key concepts such as autopoiesis, dissipative structures, social networks, and a systemic understanding of evolution. The implications of the systems view of life for health care, management, and our global ecological and economic crises are also discussed. Written primarily for undergraduates, it is also essential reading for graduate students and researchers interested in understanding the new systemic conception of life and its implications for a broad range of professions - from economics and politics to medicine, psychology and law.
Providing genome-informed personalized treatment is a goal of modern medicine. Identifying new translational targets in nucleic acid characterizations is an important step toward that goal. The information tsunami produced by such genome-scale investigations is stimulating parallel developments in statistical methodology and inference, analytical frameworks, and computational tools. Within the context of genomic medicine and with a strong focus on cancer research, this book describes the integration of high-throughput bioinformatics data from multiple platforms to inform our understanding of the functional consequences of genomic alterations. This includes rigorous and scalable methods for simultaneously handling diverse data types such as gene expression array, miRNA, copy number, methylation, and next-generation sequencing data. This material is written for statisticians who are interested in modeling and analyzing high-throughput data. Chapters by experts in the field offer a thorough introduction to the biological and technical principles behind multiplatform high-throughput experimentation.
Genome sequences are now available that enable us to determine the biological components that make up a cell or an organism. The discipline of systems biology examines how these components interact and form networks, and how the networks generate whole cell functions corresponding to observable phenotypes. This textbook, devoted to systems biology, describes how to model networks, how to determine their properties, and how to relate these to phenotypic functions. The prerequisites are some knowledge of linear algebra and biochemistry. Though the links between the mathematical ideas and biological processes are made clear, the book reflects the irreversible trend of increasing mathematical content in biology education. Therefore to assist both teacher and student, in an associated website Palsson provides problem sets, projects and Powerpoint slides, and keeps the presentation in the book concrete with illustrative material and experimental results.
Biophysical models have been used in biology for decades, but they have been limited in scope and size. In this book, Bernhard Ø. Palsson shows how network reconstructions that are based on genomic and bibliomic data, and take the form of established stoichiometric matrices, can be converted into dynamic models using metabolomic and fluxomic data. The Mass Action Stoichiometric Simulation (MASS) procedure can be used for any cellular process for which data is available and allows a scalable step-by-step approach to the practical construction of network models. Specifically, it can treat integrated processes that need explicit accounting of small molecules and protein, which allows simulation at the molecular level. The material has been class-tested by the author at both the undergraduate and graduate level. All computations in the text are available online in MATLAB® and Mathematica® workbooks, allowing hands-on practice with the material.
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