Fundamentals of Systems Biology : From Synthetic Circuits to Whole-cell Models

Every year, the world''s governments spend over US $700 billion subsidizing activities that harm the environment. The Natural Wealth of Nations shows how cutting these wasteful subsidies can actually boost the economy, save tax and help the environment.By raising taxes on harmful activities like air pollution whilst cutting taxes on payrolls and profits, pollution is discouraged and both work and investment boosted.In a comprehensive global survey, The Natural Wealth of Nations provides examples from Sweden to Spain to Malalysia of the growing number of countries that are successfully using these market-based approaches to clean up their environments. This is an accessible, practical book offering concrete proposals for cleaning up the world?s environment and overcoming ecological ignorance.

For decades biology has focused on decoding cellular processes one gene at a time, but many of the most pressing biological questions, as well as diseases such as cancer and heart disease, are related to complex systems involving the interaction of hundreds, or even thousands, of gene products and other factors. How do we begin to understand this complexity? Fundamentals of Systems Biology: From Synthetic Circuits to Whole-cell Models introduces students to methods they can use to tackle complex systems head-on, carefully walking them through studies that comprise the foundation and frontier of systems biology. The first section of the book focuses on bringing students quickly up to speed with a variety of modeling methods in the context of a synthetic biological circuit. This innovative approach builds intuition about the strengths and weaknesses of each method and becomes critical in the book‘s second half, where much more complicated network models are addressed including transcriptional, signaling, metabolic, and even integrated multi-network models.The approach makes the work much more accessible to novices (undergraduates, medical students, and biologists new to mathematical modeling) while still having much to offer experienced modelers--whether their interests are microbes, organs, whole organisms, diseases, synthetic biology, or just about any field that investigates living systems.