High Impact Systems BiologyJournals

Systems biology is the computational and mathematical analysis and modeling of complex biological systems. It is a biology-based interdisciplinary field of study that focuses on complex interactions within biological systems, using a holistic to biological research. When it is crossing the field of systems theory and the applied mathematics methods, it develops into the sub-branch of complex systems biology. Systems biology finds its roots in the quantitative modeling of enzyme kinetics, a discipline that flourished between 1900 and 1970, the mathematical modeling of population dynamics, the simulations developed to study neurophysiology, control theory and cybernetics, and synergetics. One of the theorists who can be seen as one of the precursors of systems biology is Ludwig von Bertalanffy with his general systems theory. One of the first numerical simulations in cell biology was published in 1952 by the British neurophysiologists and Nobel prize winners Alan Lloyd Hodgkin and Andrew Fielding Huxley, who constructed a mathematical model that explained the action potential propagating along the axon of a neuronal cell. Their model described a cellular function emerging from the interaction between two different molecular components, a potassium and a sodium channel, and can therefore be seen as the beginning of computational systems biology.