Systems biology and bioinformatics have become intensive research topics in the recent decade because of the emergence of high‐throughput biological technologies. The generated large biological data have provided an alternative and a comprehensive way to decipher the biological systems at molecular and network levels. These research topics have attracted many leading scientists in Biology, Physics, Mathematics, Systems Science, Computer Science, Control Science and Statistics. Many computational and mathematical systems biology methods have been widely developed to meet the request for big data.
The 6th IEEE International Conference on Systems Biology (ISB2012), organised by Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and Xidian University has been held in Xi'an, China, during 18–20 August 2012. The conference is sponsored by National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), Academy of Mathematics and Systems Sciences of CAS (AMSS), Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences of CAS (SIBS), Xidian University, Computational Systems Biology Society of ORSC (Operations Research Society of China), Systems Biology Technical Committee of IEEE SMC Society and also technically sponsored by IEEE SMC Society and IET Society.
In this Special Issue, selected papers from ISB 2012 present new research findings and state‐of‐the‐art solutions in this interdisciplinary field, including mathematical, computational and statistical methods and their applications in biosciences and researches on various aspects of Systems Biology, such as integration of genome‐wide microarray, proteomic and metabolomics data, inference and comparison of biological networks and model testing through design of experiments. These ten papers cover various solutions to the challenging problems in the interdisciplinary areas of computational systems biology. In particular, the topics include graphical model of identifying significant regulatory networks, stability analysis of gene regulatory network with time‐varying delays, switch‐like signal transduction regulation, functional tunability of biological circuits, morphological evolution analysis, pathways and modules identification from RNA‐seq and SNP datasets, disease gene identification and drug reposition in system‐wide scale and so on.
I would like to thank the co‐chair of ISB 2012, Professor Xiang‐Sun Zhang and the local organiser Professor Lin Gao for organising the conference. I also thank all of the authors for the high‐quality papers that they contributed to this Special Issue and all of the anonymous reviewers for their great efforts and expert comments in evaluating the manuscripts. I am grateful to my co‐guest editor Dr. Zhiping Liu for his help and diligent work on this Special Issue. Finally, I would also like to thank the Editor‐in‐Chief, Professor Kwang‐Hyun Cho, for giving us the great opportunities to guest edit this Special Issue.
Biography
Luonan Chen received the ME and PhD degrees in electrical engineering from Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan, in 1988 and 1991, respectively. Beginning in 1997, he was an associate professor at the Osaka Sangyo University, Osaka, Japan, and then a full professor. Since 2010, he has been a professor and executive director at the Key Laboratory of Systems Biology, Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He was the founding director of the Institute of Systems Biology, Shanghai University. He serves as chair of the Technical Committee on Systems Biology of the IEEE SMC Society, and as the founding president of the Computational Systems Biology Society of ORS China. He serves as an editor or editorial board member for major systems biology related journals, e.g., BMC Systems Biology, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, IET Systems Biology, Mathematical Biosciences, Journal of Theoretical Biology, Journal of the Royal Society Interface, Journal of Theoretical Biology, and Journal of Molecular Cell Biology. His fields of interest are systems biology, computational biology, and nonlinear dynamics. In the past five years, he published more than 100 journal papers and two monographs in the area of systems biology.