Systems biologists—modern-day Lewis and Clark

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I compare PNNL's work with biological systems to the work of explorers--and settlers. We are like the explorers who set out to discover distant places, paving the way for the pioneers who settled them. In traditional biology, we have almost finished cataloging the different parts of living organisms and now we want to integrate what we know. We're ready to build the infrastructure we need to settle certain biological areas.

Systems biology is a program for understanding the network structure of cells--how cells take materials and data from their environment and process them to get energy and to get the information that allows them to survive.

All the problems we have in diseases, toxicity, dysfunctions of cells and health and illness are about a failure to communicate among cells or among organisms. We want to know how the machinery inside cells works so we can fix it if it goes wrong or modify it when we want to do other things.

The "settler" work at hand--synthesizing complex information and building a scientific infrastructure--is much more of an engineering task than a traditional biology task. The kind of expertise that biology needs to take the next big step in integrating information is in engineering and the physical and chemical sciences. We need to integrate these disciplines into biological research.

The goal of PNNL's Biomolecular Systems Initiative is to build a scientific infrastructure that allows researchers to take a systems approach to science. It's a very exciting time because, in a way, we are setting up a structure for the way science will be done 20 years from now. We're just at the beginning of this process of understanding life by understanding how cells work and understanding how to use cells to do all sorts of wonderful things.

In the Pacific Northwest, we envision a consortium of scientific and computer organizations that will turn the region into a powerhouse for personalized, predictive medicine. We're working with the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center to identify biomarkers--proteins that we can find in samples of your blood to diagnose all sorts of diseases based on knowing what those protein patterns mean.

You can take a car and plug it into a computer and diagnose everything that's wrong. Why can't we take a serum sample from a person and analyze its composition in an hour, take that information, put it in a computer and say, "Oh, we know what's wrong with you."? To do that, we're going to need many new technologies.

At PNNL, we have biologists, engineers, computer scientists and other scientists working on a variety of key projects.

We also are developing a systems infrastructure in three areas. First, we're investigating microbial communities. Microbes rarely work by themselves; they work as groups of organisms, so we have to figure out how microbes talk to each other as well as how they exchange information, carbon and energy.

PNNL's Jim Frederickson is leading our work with Shewanella, a bacteria that can turn water-soluble uranium into water-insoluble uranium and can live with or without the presence of oxygen. Understanding how Shewanella functions may lead to using it to help remediate contaminated waste sites. It also may help explain how early life on earth developed.

We're also examining how cells respond to oxidative stress, which happens when they are exposed to toxins or low doses of radiation. Finally, we are developing computer models of how human cells grow and divide. All of these areas will help us understand how human cells respond to environmental stress.

For more information about the Biomolecular Systems Initiative, see http://www.sysbio.org.