Will systems biology offer new holistic paradigms to life sciences?

Abstract

A biological system, like any complex system, blends stochastic and deterministic features, displaying properties of both. In a certain sense, this blend is exactly what we perceive as the "essence of complexity" given we tend to consider as non-complex both an ideal gas (fully stochastic and understandable at the statistical level in the thermodynamic limit of a huge number of particles) and a frictionless pendulum (fully deterministic relative to its motion). In this commentary we make the statement that systems biology will have a relevant impact on nowadays biology if (and only if) will be able to capture the essential character of this blend that in our opinion is the generation of globally ordered collective modes supported by locally stochastic atomisms.

Fig. 1

The Figure reports the correlation between the values of expression of around 23,000 genes (the vector points of the figure) relative to two different populations of blood cells (macrophages) bearing a mutation as for a very important gene involved in innate immunity (Myd88ko) and wild type respectively. Pearson r (product moment correlation coefficient) between the gene expression vectors of the two populations is near the maximum attainable (r = 0.998)