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Toward a systems biology approach to investigate cellular networks in normal and malignant B cells

Leukemia volume 23, pages 1219–1225 (2009)Cite this article

Abstract

In recent years, we experienced an increasing development of new technologies that aim to comprehensively dissect the molecular genetics of cellular phenotypes. Pioneering studies have been performed on leukemia and lymphoma and then extended to many other types of malignancies. Genome-wide technologies allow taking snapshots of defined cellular context from an unbiased angle highlighting a complexity that we still struggle to fully interpret. The increasing availability of technologies to detect genetic, transcriptional and post-transcriptional characteristics of cellular systems needs to be associated with the development of computational tools to fully investigate these data in an integrated way. The evolution of different genome-wide technologies as well as data mining and integration tools will be discussed following studies performed on normal and malignant human mature B cells.

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Ulf Klein, Pavel Sumazin and Roy L Maute for critical reading of the manuscript and to Govind Bhagat for providing photographic material used in Figure 2. I thank Riccardo Dalla-Favera and Andrea Califano for leading me into an interdisciplinary path where biological and computational sciences walk together.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Cancer Genetics, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

    K Basso

  2. Department of Pediatrics, University of Padova, Padova, Italy

    K Basso

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  1. K Basso
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Correspondence to K Basso.

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Basso, K. Toward a systems biology approach to investigate cellular networks in normal and malignant B cells. Leukemia 23, 1219–1225 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/leu.2009.4

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