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Systems biology

Reverse engineering the cell

Nature volume 454, pages 1061–1062 (2008)Cite this article

Borrowing ideas that were originally developed to study electronic circuits, two reports decipher how yeast reacts to changes in its environment by analysing the organism's responses to oscillating input signals.

Systems biology has certainly caught people's attention. But when pressed to define precisely what it is, let alone how it will complement classic reductionist approaches, concrete answers can be hard to find. One immediate, practical contribution of systems biology is that it suggests new ways of interrogating cellular responses to stimuli, and provides a framework for understanding the results1. In this spirit, two papers2,3 now borrow ideas from the theory of system identification — a formal strategy for building mathematical models of dynamic systems based on experimental data — to examine the response of yeast cells to changes in their environment. In both cases, the authors use microfluidics to control precisely the external stimuli and to quantify the cells' responses. The authors thus unravel some of the 'wiring' of the signal transduction networks that monitor these environmental changes.

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Figure 1: Modelling dynamic systems.

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  1. Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology, Nicholas T. Ingolia and Jonathan S. Weissman are at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, University of California, San Francisco, and California Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Research, San Francisco, California 94158-2542, USA. weissman@cmp.ucsf.edu,

    Nicholas T. Ingolia & Jonathan S. Weissman

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  1. Nicholas T. Ingolia
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  2. Jonathan S. Weissman
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Ingolia, N., Weissman, J. Reverse engineering the cell. Nature 454, 1061–1062 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/4541059a

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