Unraveling natures networks 英文参考文献.docVIP

Meeting report Unraveling nature’s networks Lev Soinov and Misha Kapushesky Address: EBI-EMBL, Microarray Informatics Group, Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge CB10 1SD, UK. Correspondence: Lev Soinov. E-mail: lev@ebi.ac.uk Published: 16 September 2003 Genome Biology 2003, 4:341 The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at /2003/4/10/341 ? 2003 BioMed Central Ltd of experts with different scientific backgrounds on both A report on the meeting ‘Unravelling Nature’s Networks: from Microarray and Proteomic Analysis to Systems Biology’, Sheffield, UK, 21-22 July 2003. ‘large’ and ‘small’ scales, can lead us to fruitful results. The predominant idea now is that a fusion of novel techniques with expert knowledge will help to avoid what can otherwise happen: the transformation of high-throughput concepts into scattered attempts to gather a lot of costly experimental information, often with only a vague purpose. Understanding complex regulatory biochemical networks in cells, tissues and on an organism-wide scale has become the holy grail of biologists and bioinformaticians alike. The ‘Unravelling Nature’s Networks: from Microarray and Pro- teomic Analysis to Systems Biology’ meeting put together recent experimental and computational advances, providing a picture of how far we have come in this subject, and outlin- ing ways forward. The opening talk was given by Steve Dower (University of Sheffield, UK), who studies gene expression in signaling pathways associated with chronic inflammatory diseases and host defense mechanisms. He showed that, although in general the considered signaling system is highly robust to changes in activator expression and responds in a linear fashion even to many-fold overexpression, it consists of ‘noisy’ stochastic components. Indeed, he noted that gene expression varies