Biometris has a long and flourishing tradition in developing mathematical models that describe dynamical phenomena in the life sciences. Since a couple of years these activities are brought together in the Research Theme Systems Biology (SB), and recently an extension to Systems Ecology (SE) has been realized. Since an concise description of SB is hard to give, we mention the three characteristics of this discipline:
1. Modeling cycle: experimental and theoretical approaches alternate and inspire each other,
2. Connecting aggregation level: from the subcellular level to ecosystems,
3. Multidisciplinarity: SB requires cooperation between biologists, chemists, mathematicians, statisticians, and bioinformaticians.
Our contribution to SB and SE is developing mathematical models to describe the dynamical behavior of the different components of biological systems in an integrated way. Key notion in all our SB and SE projects is that biological systems are described by ‘networks’ and our research aims at unraveling the dynamical behavior of those networks. This behavior is usually modeled in terms of differential equations. The networks presently studied are gene networks, metabolic networks, population networks, and ecological networks such as food webs in the soil. So, our research ranges from the lowest to the highest aggregation levels. That is possible due to the fact that the mathematics involved in all these different scales is quite similar.
Running projects within this theme are listed here.
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The different levels of the House of Systems Biology:
Ecosystem
Population
Organism
Organ
Tissue
Cell
Transcriptome
Genome |
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