Netherlands Institute for Systems Biology

NETWORKS FOR LIFE

Mission

NISB develops and exploits systems biology tools and approaches to investigate complex biological systems and unravel their underlying principles.
Biological systems are approached as networks of molecules, cells, tissues and organisms that interact in time and space. This is achieved through excellent research and by amalgamating biological and biomedical sciences with chemistry, physics, mathematics, informatics and engineering.

Ambition

NISB wants to be a high profile international centre for systems biology. It intends to play a central role in developing the scientific field of systems biology by being a major provider of systems biology expertise and tools in the academic field and with broad application in the pharmaceutical, biotechnological and food industry. In particular in biomedical research the need for systems biology increases rapidly. This ambition will be achieved through excellent science, by developing courses and training programmes for post-graduate scientists and by taking initiatives for national and international collaborative research and infrastructural programmes. In the past years several NISB scientists have shown that they are successful players in the international systems biology field.

Focus

In its initial phase NISB concentrates on biomolecular networks at the cellular level, in particular metabolic networks, signal transduction networks, genetic networks and force-shape generating networks. NISB will pay special attention to the development of generic tools and approaches that allow us to integrate the functioning of these networks, resulting in insight into systems behaviour of the living cell. NISB starts from the notion that basic properties of biomolecular networks are conserved throughout evolution and are similar in different types of networks and in different organisms. Therefore, rather than concentrating on a single biological system, NISB focuses on different types of networks in different biological systems. The ultimate aim is to uncover the underlying common principles.

Systems biology

Systems biology is the logical step following the information explosion mostly through genomics type of analyses of biological systems. Systems biology in NISB exploits the iterative cycle of at the one hand experimentation that is driven by quantitative and predictive models and on the other hand data integration and system analysis based on data-driven modelling. Hence, NISB tightly combines ‘wet’ and ‘dry’ approaches throughout its research programme. The information explosion in biology has not resulted in a true understanding of biological systems. This is seen among others in the paucity in the rational development of new drugs and therapies for multifactorial diseases. The major hurdle is the extreme complexity of biological systems. Systems biology addresses this issue by integrating diverse types of biological information in computer-based models that integrate information, can be interrogated about system behaviour and allow the uncovering of underlying system principles.
Biologists are often not well-equipped to cope with the complexity hurdle. In the systems biology field they team up with physicists and engineers, which are used to translating experimental data into computer models and are able to work with complex systems. At the same time mathematicians play a crucial role in developing a solid basis for catching complex, multi-scale biological systems into useful models. Importantly, these disciplines discover that biological systems hold many scientifically exciting new challenges in their own fields.
Systems biology is not linked to any biological system or technology in particular. Rather it is becoming a general approach in life sciences, taking into account the high complexity of biological systems and treating systems as networks of components (molecules, cells, tissues, organisms, ecosystems) that interact in time and space on a wide range of time scales and length scales. Eventually, systems biology should result in the full understanding of complete biological systems, including man.
NISB builds on decades of expertise in molecular and cellular physiology at the two universities and more recently on the pioneering work in Amsterdam of the Westerhoff group and others. NISB amalgamates this expertise with excellent biology-inspired physics and mathematics at AMOLF and CWI, respectively. This make NISB an ideal breeding ground for systems biology.