New Frontiers of Network Analysis in Systems Biology

The rapidly developing field of systems biology is influencing many aspects of biological research and is expected to transform biomedicine. Some emerging offshoots and specialized branches in systems biology are receiving particular attention and are becoming highly active areas of research. This collection of invited reviews describes some of the latest cutting-edge experimental and computational advances in these emerging sub-fields of systems biology. In particular, this collection focuses on the study of mammalian embryonic stem cells; new technologies involving mass-spectrometry proteomics; single cell measurements; methods for modeling complex stochastic systems; network-based classification algorithms; and the revolutionary emerging field of systems pharmacology.

Avi Ma’ayan, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Systems Therapeutics at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, NY, USA. His interests are in applying graph theory, machine learning, dimensionality reduction, dynamical modeling, and visualization methods for integrating “omics” datasets collected from mammalian sources to better understand biological regulation on a global scale.

Ben D. MacArthur, Ph.D., is a Lecturer in Mathematics at the Life Science Interface in the Schools of Mathematics and Medicine at the University of Southampton, UK. His interests are in applying mathematical methods to problems in cell and molecular biology including modeling of cell fate, analysis of the structure and function of biological regulatory networks, and high throughput data analysis and bioinformatics.