Customer Reviews

Bioinformatics for Systems Biology

5 star:		(0)
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2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Systems Biology is "a biology-based inter-disciplinary study field that focuses on the systematic study of complex interactions in biological systems, thus using a new perspective (holism instead of reduction) to study them." (Wikipedia) And by studying complex interactions, one can elucidate why the combination of parts gives rise to emergent properties.

This book addresses a lot of the issues in bioinformatics, but only about 10% seems to be something that might go beyond bioinformatics. The problem is that a lot of the material is focused on the complex interactions, which is good, but the material doesn't seem to bridge to a holistic perspective of biological systems.

I give low marks because the title misled me to think that 40-60% would be about deriving emergent properties, etc., or systems biology proper. I give more than 1 star because the book has some potentially useful bioinformatics material. It might be better titled as The Bioinformatics Foundations of Systems Biology. With that title, I would have given it higher marks.

This book might be useful as a supplemental text in an introductory bioinformatics course, but not as the main text, because there should be a better one that would explicitly say "Introduction" in the title.