Systems biology meets metabolism

In the preceding chapters many aspects of metabolite quantification and relation to trait and disease phenotypes have been described, in particular the linkage of intermediate metabolic traits to genetic heterogeneities. Although many analyses start on the genome-wide level, they end up picking out single polymorphisms or other variations and study these in detail. This reductionist approach is very common in molecular biology and has proven hugely successful over the past decades. In recent years however, a second paradigm has become increasingly popular, namely that of integrating multiple such analyses into larger ones commonly called models. This paradigm, nowadays, is known as systems biology and is expected to penetrate many classical molecular analyses.     «

In the preceding chapters many aspects of metabolite quantification and relation to trait and disease phenotypes have been described, in particular the linkage of intermediate metabolic traits to genetic heterogeneities. Although many analyses start on the genome-wide level, they end up picking out single polymorphisms or other variations and study these in detail. This reductionist approach is very common in molecular biology and has proven hugely successful over the past decades. In recent yea...     »