Department of Biotechnology, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, Guwahati 781039, Assam, India.
Prog Biophys Mol Biol. 2013 Dec;113(3):358-68. doi: 10.1016/j.pbiomolbio.2013.07.001. Epub 2013 Jul 16.
The debate over reductionism and antireductionism in biology is very old. Even the systems approach in biology is more than five decades old. However, mainstream biology, particularly experimental biology, has broadly sidestepped those debates and ideas. Post-genome data explosion and development of high-throughput techniques led to resurfacing of those ideas and debates as a new incarnation called Systems Biology. Though experimental biologists have co-opted systems biology and hailed it as a paradigm shift, it is practiced in different shades and understood with divergent meanings. Biology has certain questions linked with organization of multiple components and processes. Often such questions involve multilevel systems. Here in this essay we argue that systems theory provides required framework and abstractions to explore those questions. We argue that systems biology should follow the logical and mathematical approach of systems theory and transmogrification of systems biology to mere collection of higher dimensional data must be avoided. Therefore, the questions that we ask and the priority of those questions should also change. Systems biology should focus on system-level properties and investigate complexity without shying away from it.
生物学中的还原论和反还原论之争由来已久。甚至生物学中的系统方法也有五十多年的历史了。然而，主流生物学，特别是实验生物学，已经广泛回避了这些争论和观点。后基因组数据的爆炸式增长和高通量技术的发展使得这些观点和争论以一种新的形式重新出现，被称为系统生物学。尽管实验生物学家已经采用了系统生物学，并将其誉为范式转变，但它的实践方式却存在差异，理解也存在分歧。生物学有一些与多个组件和过程的组织相关的问题。这些问题往往涉及多层次的系统。在这篇文章中，我们认为系统理论为探索这些问题提供了所需的框架和抽象。我们认为系统生物学应该遵循系统理论的逻辑和数学方法，避免将系统生物学仅仅转化为更高维数据的集合。因此，我们提出的问题以及这些问题的优先级也应该发生变化。系统生物学应该关注系统层面的特性，并在不回避的情况下研究复杂性。
