Genomes to Systems 2008 – day 3

Today’s seminars began with a plenary lecture from James Ferrell of Stanford University on systems-level properties of the mitotic oscillator. The morning continued with systems biology in time: dynamic cellular processes, chemical genomics: small molecules with large effects, and pharmacogenomics. I chose to attend the systems biology in time lectures.

The lectures began with Mike White of Liverpool University on temporal and spatial information encoding by the NF-kB system and continued with Olivier Pourquié (Kansas City) on periodic patterns in embryonic development: the vertibrate segmentation clock. Following this lecture we had Andrew Millar of Edinburgh on unwinding the biological clock, and finally Béla Novák of Oxford on the systems biology of the cell cycle. Béla Novák’s lecture was of particular interest and delivered with great enthusiasm. It was clear that we must dispense with reductionist approaches if we are to understand the true essence of biological systems. It is the understanding of the interplay between the various components that defines the behaviour of the system, and not the individual key components. The reductionist approach to the components is still crucial to understanding the working of the component parts, but cannot be used to describe the emergent properties of cellular processes when working as part of their overall function in the cells life cycle.

The afternoon continued with seminars on systems biology from microbe to planet: understanding lots of data through comprehensive models, advanced concepts and techniques in array informatics, and clinical genomics of cancer.

I chose to attend the systems biology modelling lectures and we had Masaru Tomita (Keio) on multi-omics analysis and integrative systems biology, Steve Oliver (Cambridge) on yeast systems biology, and Matthias Reuss from Stuttgart on unravelling regulatory networks in hepatocytes on the basis of time-series data.

The afternoon finished with David Richardson of Norwich who presented an interesting talk on the global nitrogen cycle, detailing the effect of nitrogen fixing bacteria on the environment and how it fits into the current issues around the environment, particularly its under-reported importance next to the levels of carbon in the environment.

The conference was concluded by an excellent lecture from Hans Westerhoff of Manchester/Amsterdam entitled “from genomes to systems… dealing with the networks”. Professor Westerhoff presented some interesting theories on the future of systems biology, together with some new mathematics on fragility that went with his theories on control coefficients and robustness.

I found the conference very interesting, and it was a great opportunity to be immersed in the community of systems biology. It was inspiring to see so many people working in the field without the usual question of “what the heck is systems biology?”… although I don’t think anybody had a clear definition of what the heck it is anyway!