Evolutionary Systems Biology
| This picture symbolizes much of what we know about the adaptive landscape: Fascinating, important looking, but mostly in the dark and hard to quantify. At this stage we often don't even know what axes to use, let alone how to navigate this maze. A key goal of EvoSysBio is to quantify various aspects of the adaptive landscape to improve our understanding of is important metaphor for evolutionary biology. |
Welcome! |
Evolutionary systems biology aims to bring together the rich mechanistic details of current systems biology and the long-standing quantitative experience in evolutionary genetics in order to increase the quantitative rigor of biological analyses. Since current systems biology means many things to many people, it is perhaps inevitable that evolutionary systems biology might be even broader. A potentially useful framework that goes beyond comparative analyses of systems biology data was described recently and centers around a research program to quantify the adaptive landscape (Loewe, 2009). If you are interested in related work, you may want to attend the upcoming Symposium on Evolutionary Systems Biology which will be part of the 2011 Congress of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology, 20-25 Aug 2011 in Tübingen, Germany.
References Ibarra, R. U., Edwards, J. S., & Palsson, B. O. (2002) Escherichia coli K-12 undergoes adaptive evolution to achieve in silico predicted optimal growth. Nature 420, 186-9. PubMed Wagner A (2008) "Neutralism and selectionism: a network-based reconciliation.", Nat Rev Genet 9:965-74. PubMed
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