Jianfeng Feng

Jürgen Jost

Minping Qian

Recent decades have witnessed the thriving development of new mathematical, computational and theoretical approaches, such as bioinformatics and neuroinformatics, to tackle fundamental issues in biology. These approaches focus no longer on individual units, such as nerve cells or genes, but rather on dynamic patterns of interactions between them. This volume explores the concept in full, featuring contributions from a global group of contributors, many of whom are pre-eminent in their field.

Networks: From Biology to Theory

Wenjiang Fu

Fengzhu Sun

Biological and biomedical studies have entered a new era over the past two decades thanks to the wide use of mathematical models and computational approaches. A booming of computational biology, which sheerly was a theoretician’s fantasy twenty years ago, has become a reality. Obsession with computational biology and theoretical approaches is evidenced in articles hailing the arrival of what are va- ously called quantitative biology, bioinformatics, theoretical biology, and systems biology. New technologies and data resources in genetics, such as the International HapMap project, enable large-scale studies, such as genome-wide association st- ies, which could potentially identify most common genetic variants as well as rare variants of the human DNA that may alter individual’s susceptibility to disease and the response to medical treatment. Meanwhile the multi-electrode recording from behaving animals makes it feasible to control the animal mental activity, which could potentially lead to the development of useful brain–machine interfaces. - bracing the sheer volume of genetic, genomic, and other type of data, an essential approach is, ?rst of all, to avoid drowning the true signal in the data. It has been witnessed that theoretical approach to biology has emerged as a powerful and st- ulating research paradigm in biological studies, which in turn leads to a new - search paradigm in mathematics, physics, and computer science and moves forward with the interplays among experimental studies and outcomes, simulation studies, and theoretical investigations.

Frontiers in Computational and Systems Biology

How does the brain work? After a century of research, we still lack a coherent view of how neurons process signals and control our activities. But as the field of computational neuroscience continues to evolve, we find that it provides a theoretical foundation and a set of technological approaches that can significantly enhance our understanding.

Jianfeng Feng

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