Customer Reviews

Systems Biology in Practice: Concepts, Implementation and Application

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I thought a while before I started to write this review about how many points I should give. Does it realy deserve zero points? In my opinion, yes! (the rating system does not allow zero points)

I bought this very expensive book, written by five authors, and had so far no fun reading it nor does it provide valuable insights about currently the hot topic in biology. Let me just give some examples to make my point clear. First, not all chapters are written equal good/bad but differ. This implies that the five authors separated the chapters under each other. Chapter 4, "Experimental Techniques in a Nutshell" represents probably the negative highlight of the book. The author who has wirtten this chapter refuses persistenly to come to the point. I have to admit that it is almost impossible to explain mass spectromety, RNAi or DNA chips comprehensible if one has only one page for each of these topis. But is this not clear beforehand? This is a general problem of the book. It covers a huge list of differnt topics but the explanations of each topic is only shallow. Further examples for this: Baysian Networks, one page. Multiple linear regression, one page. Cell Cycle, one page. Ok, now we found a general law according to this the book was written. Compile a list of buzz words, order them in a meaningful way, and wirte one page to each of those terms. Finally, lets call it "Systems Biolog" and we are done. I don't think so, that's not it!

The only people this book could be useful for are undergraduate students who know nothing at all about this subject and want to get an overview about the topics collected under the phrase systems biology. But even for this reason one can not really recommend this book because it is far too expensive.

A final remark. It is clear, that books above the 100$ threshold deserve to be evaluated stronger because it hurts too buy them. If this book would cost 20$ I would give one point.

I'm studying biophysics and I recently bought the book "Systems Biology

in Practice". It is quite expensive, but I wanted to read up about Systems

Biology, since we currently discuss this in our Bioinformatics lectures.

The book consists of three major parts, the first contains three introductory

chapters about biology, mathematics and experimental techniques, the second

is the main part which contains 8 chapters that describe mathematical models

of many different biological processes like gene expression, biological

oscillations or signal transduction pathways. The last part has two chapters

that deal with databases and software tools that are available over the

internet.

I personally found the "Biology in a Nutshell" chapter very helpful, since

my biological knowledge had several gaps and the chapter is a very condensed

presentation of the most important biological facts. I think it is also

the main aim of the three chapters about biology, mathematics and

experimental techniques to provide people coming from different fields with

some basic information about those topics.

All in all the book covers a large variety of different topics and the models

and information is presented with helpful examples and figures, so that I

find it quite entertaining to read.

My only point of critique is that I'm still not sure what systems biology is,

since there seems to be no generally accepted definition. However, I found

the book very useful to understand mathematical modelling of biochemical

systems and I use it often as reference book.