Complex systems biology


Complex systems biology is a branch or subfield of mathematical and theoretical biology concerned with complexity of both structure and function in biological organisms, as well as the emergence and evolution of organisms and species, with emphasis being placed on the complex interactions of, and within, bionetworks, and on the fundamental relations and relational patterns that are essential to life. CSB is thus a field of theoretical sciences aimed at discovering and modeling the relational patterns essential to life that has only a partial overlap with complex systems theory, and also with the systems approach to biology called systems biology; this is because the latter is restricted primarily to simplified models of biological organization and organisms, as well as to only a general consideration of philosophical or semantic questions related to complexity in biology. Moreover, a wide range of abstract theoretical complex systems are studied as a field of applied mathematics, with or without relevance to biology, chemistry or physics.

Complexity of organisms and biosphere

A complete definition of complexity for individual organisms, species, ecosystems, biological evolution and the biosphere has eluded researchers, and still is an ongoing issue.
Most complex system models are often formulated in terms of concepts drawn from statistical physics, information theory and non-linear dynamics; however, such approaches are not focused on, or do not include, the conceptual part of complexity related to organization and topological attributes or algebraic topology, such as network connectivity of genomes, interactomes and biological organisms that are very important. Recently, the two complementary approaches based both on information theory, network topology/abstract graph theory concepts are being combined for example in the fields of neuroscience and human cognition. It is generally agreed that there is a hierarchy of complexity levels of organization that should be considered as distinct from that of the levels of reality in ontology. The hierarchy of complexity levels of organization in the biosphere is also recognized in modern classifications
of taxonomic ranks, such as: biological domain and biosphere, biological kingdom, Phylum, biological class, order, family, genus and species. Because of their dynamic and composition variability, intrinsic "fuzziness", autopoietic attributes, ability to self-reproduce, and so on, organisms do not fit into the 'standard' definition of general systems, and they are therefore 'super-complex' in both their function and structure; organisms can be thus be defined in CSB only as 'meta-systems' of simpler dynamic systems Such a meta-system definition of organisms, species, 'ecosystems', and so on, is not equivalent to the definition of a system of systems as in Autopoietic Systems Theory,; it also differs from the definition proposed for example by K.D. Palmer in meta-system engineering, organisms being quite different from machines and automata with fixed input-output transition functions, or a continuous dynamical system with fixed phase space, contrary to the Cartesian philosophical thinking; thus, organisms cannot be defined merely in terms of a quintuple A of , although 'non-deterministic automata', as well as 'fuzzy automata' have also been defined. Tessellation or cellular automata provide however an intuitive, visual/computational insight into the lower levels of complexity, and have therefore become an increasingly popular, discrete model studied in computability theory, applied mathematics, physics, computer science, theoretical biology/systems biology, cancer simulations and microstructure modeling. Evolving cellular automata using genetic algorithms is also an emerging field attempting to bridge the gap between the tessellation automata and the higher level complexity approaches in CSB.

Topics in complex systems biology

The following is only a partial list of topics covered in complex systems biology: