 | Perspectives on Systems Biology
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| | 1) Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc.
2) ERATO Kitano Symbiotic Systems Project, Japan Science and Technology Corporation |
| | The ultimate goal of biology is to explain every detail and principle of biological systems. Biological systems refer to various forms of natural life, such as bacteria, cells, individual creatures. Since the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953 [Watson and Click, 53], the field of molecular biology has emerged and has made enormous progress. Molecular biology enables us to understand biological systems grounded on physical systems; that is, on molecular machines composed of proteins. Many biological processes—such as those of heredity, development, disease—can now discussed on a molecular basis, and the basic mechanisms of the such processes can be made clear. Such mechanisms include replication, transcription, translation, etc. Genes and the functions of their transcription products have been identified. The symbolic accomplishment along this line of research is the complete sequencing of DNA. DNA sequences were completely decoded for a numbers of organisms—such as mycoplasma, E. coli, C. elegans, Drosophila, and the sequencing of human DNA is expected to complete within a couple of years. The identification of genes from these sequences has also underway with astonishing speed, and studies deepening our understanding of protein and their interactions are also in progress. Parallel to such efforts, numbers of methods for disturbing biological systems selectively, such as loss-of-function knock-out of specific genes, have been and are being invented. For a particular species, C. elegans, an easy and efficient disruption method called RNA interference (RNAi) was invented, and a project to systematically and exhaustively knock-out various genes is underway. |
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