Systems biology is an interdisciplinary research field in life sciences, which involves a comprehensive and quantitative analysis of the interactions between all of the components of biological systems over time. For the past 50 years the discipline of virology has overly focused on the pathogen itself. However, we now know that the host response is equally or more important in defining the eventual pathological outcome of infection. Systems biology has in recent years been increasingly recognised for its importance to infectious disease research. Host-virus interactions can be better understood by taking into account the dynamical molecular networks that constitute a biological system. To decipher the pathobiological mechanisms of any disease requires a deep knowledge of how multiple and concurrent signal-transduction pathways operate and are deregulated. Hence the intricacies of signalling pathways can be dissected only by system level approaches.
Keywords: DNA, deoxyribonucleic acid; Genomics; HPI, host pathogen interactions; Holistic; PBMC, peripheral blood mononuclear cells; Proteomics; RNA, ribonucleic acid; RNA-seq, ribonucleic acid sequencing; Reductionist; SNP, single nucleotide polymorphism; Systems biology; Transcriptomics; miRNA, microRNA.
© 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.