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Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Bioinformatics: An Inseparable part of Systems Biology.

Hello everybody,

As per the title of this post, today I'm going to discuss about two widely used terms Bioinformatics and Systems Biology. Well, this time I'm here not to illuminate you with some new information, since none of these terms are newly coined terms, rather my objective behind this post is to share my personal view on these popular disciplines of modern biology, their relation and interdependency on each other.

Let's first come to Systems Biology; what does it mean?

Systems biology deals with biological phenomenon at systems level and systems are defined to be a cluster/collection of smaller components on which we, or the viewer have interest. Now, if we consider cell as a system then its building materials are organelles, macro-micro molecules and the genetic materials (DNA and RNA). If we consider an organ as a system, then its component tissues and the signalling system are the building material of the system. So, what appears from the discussion so far is that this term "system" in biological context is very flexible and it follows some kind of hiererchical construction. 

We gathered huge amount of information about these biological entities from varieties types of experiments, which are needed to be organized and accessible in order to fetch out other valuable information out of them- and this is nothing but bioinformatics. So, without the proper organization of biological data and without the facility to fetch out valuable information out of them, it is impossible to stitch those entities together to build a system. 

Thus, Bioinformatics should me viewed as a inseparable, rather than only as an important part of systems biology.     

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