Systems Approaches Applied to the Study of Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Halobacterium sp.

Abstract

Integrative systems approaches to studying biologicalsystems have begun to yield striking results. Systems biology has emerged as a powerful new approach over thepast 5 years because of (1) the completion of the humanand many other genome sequences, which led to the identification and prediction of comprehensive gene lists; (2)the development of high-throughput techniques for genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and phenomics, leading to the acquisition of global data sets; and (3) the creation of powerful computational methods for storing andassessing different types of global data sets as well as analyzing and integrating them. The integration of differentdata types is essential because it helps to deal with noisethat is inherent in large data sets and it reveals new biological phenomena that are not obvious from the analysisof single data types. Here we summarize the initial applications of systems biology to two systems: one, whichhas been studied intensively for years (the galactose utilization system in yeast), and a second (the oxygen andlight responses in Halobacterium sp.) for which little dataare available. Systems approaches have allowed us togain new and fundamental insights into both systems(Ideker et al. 2001; Baliga et al. 2002)...