Publications

This meeting report gives an overview of the keynote lectures and a selection of the student presentations at the 5(th) International Society for Computational Biology Student Council Symposium at the 17(th) Annual International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) and the 8(th) European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB). The symposium was held in Stockholm, Sweden from June 27 to July 2, 2009. We also report ...

The comprehension of living organisms in all their complexity poses a major challenge to the biological sciences. Recently, systems biology has been proposed as a new candidate in the development of such a comprehension. The main objective of this paper is to address what systems biology is and how it is practised. To this end, the basic tools of a systems biological approach are explored and illustrated. In addition, it is questioned whether ...

Systems Biology aims to take up the challenge of the post-genome era by developing means to handle the data flood in the contemporary ‘omic’ sciences. One of the challenges is to ‘turn data into knowledge’, which gives rise to the question of the functional meaning of the structural data. Systems Biology tries to answer this question by capturing the organisation of a biological system through mathematical and computational modelling. In this ...

Synthetic biology aims to synthesize novel biological systems or re design existing ones. The field has raised numerous philosophical questions, but most especially what is novel to this field. In this article I argue for a novel take, since the dominant ways to understand synthetic biology’s specificity each face problems. Inspired by the examination of the work of a number of chemists, I argue that synthetic biology differentiates itself by a ...

Endochondral ossification, the mechanism responsible for the development of the long bones, is dependent on an extremely stringent coordination between the processes of chondrocyte maturation in the growth plate, vascular expansion in the surrounding tissues, and osteoblast differentiation and osteogenesis in the perichondrium and the developing bone center. The synchronization of these processes occurring in adjacent tissues is regulated ...

Blood parasites have been recorded in a variety of vertebrate and invertebrate hosts, inhabiting both aquatic and terrestrial environments. Until this study, only a few blood parasite surveys had been carried out on frogs in sub-Saharan Africa. Thus information on the diversity of these parasites remained limited. To increase our knowledge of frog blood parasites, a large multi-approach study on the diversity, evolutionary biology, and ecology ...

Pesticides are indispensable for ensuring a stable food supply chain and their world-wide use is increasing. However, they are a major environmental concern due to their recalcitrant nature and toxicity towards non-target organisms. Despite increasingly stringent regulations, pesticides continue to exceed mandated threshold levels in ground and surface waters. To address this persistence issue, a better understanding of the environmental fate of ...

Philosophy of biology before biology Edited by Cécilia Bognon-Küss & Charles T. Wolfe   Table of contents Cécilia Bognon-Küss & Charles T. Wolfe. Introduction 1. Cécilia Bognon-Küss & Charles T. Wolfe. The idea of “philosophy of biology before biology”: a methodological provocation Part I. FORM AND DEVELOPMENT 2. Stéphane Schmitt. Buffon’s theories of generation and the changing dialectics of molds and molecules 3. Phillip Sloan. ...