Abstract and subjects
In the mid 1990s when Leroy Hood reintroduced the term “Systems Biology”, the fusion of ideas gave rise to confusion to such an extent that there used to be special talks on ‘what is systems biology’? Over the last decade, Systems Biology has undergone directed evolution leading to the emergence of personalized versions of this term. Irrespective of this, strong computational dependency and a significant increase in the scale of investigation often appear as constant features in the systems biology background. In our opinion, Systems Biology is an approach that involves the following (a) experimental and computational studies describing collective behavior of molecules in relation to the pathway and networks, and with the higher-level physiological outcome (b) new experimental and mathematical methods important to study group behavior of interacting components. This chapter describes the origin and evolution of systems biology, as a formal discipline, steps and challenges in building models and their potential applications.