Research proposal in Systems Biology Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Research proposal in Systems Biology - Essay Example For instance, "power techniques like RNAi for the first time enables a very precise perturbation of parts of biological pathways," (Goldbeter, 2002) and development in fluorescent techniques offers us for the first time the possibility to measure mobility of single molecule in a living system and the distances and interaction of protein in vivo or calcium concentration in Cytoplasm or organelles (Goldbeter). It is no longer news that reconstructing genetic circuits into synthetic replicas may afford unique insight into the underlying mechanism of the circuits, and that, consequent on this synthetizaton, the possibility now exists to study circuits' mechanism without impairing cellular functions. However, such insights into underlying mechanisms cannot explain why certain kinds of biological behavior can occur only under certain sets of precise conditions, and why extrapolative and intuitive expectations based upon very exact (non-quantitative) descriptions do not suffice to accurately predict such conditional behaviors. For instance, cytosolic Ca2+ oscillations of the cellular rhythms [2,3] category "are triggered in various types of cell by treatment with a hormone or neurotransmitter." (Science Week, 1997) contrary to speculative expectations of such outcomes as dissimilar, perhaps