Systems Biology Gateway

Microbes in health and disease - a new series

Guest Editor Martin Hibberd highlights advances in genomics, metagenomics and other high-throughput approaches for studying human-microbe interactions in health and disease, and the applications for medicine.

Neurogenomics

From GWAS to Neanderthal genomes: Fisher and Deriziotis review what genomics can teach us about speech, language and their associated disorders

Cancer isoforms sign off

Expression profiles at the isoform level perform better than those at the gene level to discriminate between cancer cell lines and non-oncogenic cells, regardless of tissue of origin.

Evolutionary algorithms enhance optimal assignment methods

The optimization and visualization of edge weights in optimal assignment methods is a valuable approach for ligandbased virtual screening experiments and provides a useful tool for drug discovery.

Applying systems biology methods to the study of human physiology in extreme environments

Edwards and Thiele define Systems Biology as "an iterative process of computational model-building and experimental model-revision with the aim of understanding or simulating complex biological systems". Further, they highlight the limited number of physiologically relevant perturbations that are ethically acceptable in humans and highlight the value of environmental and exertional stressors in this context.