551-1174-00L  Systems Biology

SemesterSpring Semester 2019
LecturersU. Sauer, K. M. Borgwardt, J. Stelling, N. Zamboni
Periodicityyearly recurring course
Language of instructionGerman


AbstractThe course teaches computational methods and first hands-on applications by starting from biological problems/phenomena that students in the 4th semester are somewhat familiar with. During the exercises, students will obtain first experience with programming their own analyses/models for data analysis/interpretation.
ObjectiveWe will teach little if any novel biological knowledge or analysis methods, but focus on training the ability of use existing knowledge (for example from enzyme kinetics, regulatory mechanisms or analytical methods) to understand biological problems that arise when considering molecular elements in their context and to translate some of these problems into a form that can be solved by computational methods. Specific goals are:
- understand the limitations of intuitive reasoning
- obtain a first overview of computational approaches in systems biology
- train ability to translate biological problems into computational problems
- solve practical problems by programming with MATLAB
- make first experiences in computational interpretation of biological data
- understand typical abstractions in modeling molecular systems
ContentDuring the first 7 weeks, the will focus on mechanistic modeling. Starting from simple enzyme kinetics, we will move through the dynamics of small pathways that also include regulation and end with flux balance analysis of a medium size metabolic network. During the second 7 weeks, the focus will shift to the analysis of larger data sets, such as metabolomics and transcriptomics that are often generated in biology. Here we will go through multivariate statistical methods that include clustering and principal component analysis, ending with first methods to learn networks from data.
Lecture notesKein Skript
LiteratureThe course is not taught by a particular book, but two books are suggested for further reading:
- Systems Biology (Klipp, Herwig, Kowald, Wierling und Lehrach) Wiley-VCH 2009
- A First Course in Systems Biology (Eberhardt O. Voight) Garland Science 2012