We understand systems biology as a field of study whose goal is to develop, by integrating different levels of information, a quantitative model of the whole biological system. Through such a model a deep insight of how a biological system functions is to be obtained. A successive model will have reliable predictive powers and hence will be useful in medical diagnosis, therapeutics and in pharmaceutical research and development.

Because biological systems are extremely complex, the general nature of the study is expected to be that of understanding how higher level properties of complex systems emerge from the interactions among parts in which such properties are not apparent.

Unlike molecular biology which focuses on molecules, such as sequence of nucleotide acids and individual proteins, systems biology focuses on systems that are composed of molecular components, or of subsystems of molecular components. At the most fundamental level, systems biology employs high-throughput techniques such as microarrays, proteomics methods, mass spectrometry, and others still to be developed, to construct a network of genes and proteins involved in a biological system, and applies physical principles and mathematics to model the dynamics of the network. A vast amount of data will be needed to specify a realistic model. The model can then be explored in silico with the goal of making predictions to be tested experimentally.

This workshop is the first in a series workshops on systems biology to be organized jointly by the Systems Biology Focus Group, Physics Division, NCTS and the new Institute of Bioinformatics and Systems Biology (IBSB) at the National Central University. The workshop is open to all who are working in this exciting new field or who are interested in finding out what it is about.