*11th Bologna Winter School: Computational Methods for Systems Biology*  *University of Bologna* *
8 Feb 2010 - 12 Feb 2010


URL: http://www.biocomp.unibo.it/~school2010/ 
Systems biology is a new interdisciplinary field that aims at describing the complex interactions between the elementary components of a biological system for understanding the mechanisms at the basis of the complex biological behaviour. To this goal, several experimental techniques have been developed for finding the full content of a cell in terms of expressed mRNAs (transcriptomics), transcribed proteins (proteomics) and metabolites (metabolomics). Furthermore, techniques are available for exploring the interactions between the expressed proteins (interactomics), and between proteins and DNA-sequences (regulomics). These huge amounts of data need to be analysed considering the different tissues, the different phases of the cell cycle and the different conditions that can influence the biological processes inside the cell. For these reasons Computational methods hold a central role in Systems Biology.

The 11th edition of the Bologna Winter School will provide an introduction to different computational approaches developed for describing the structure of the interaction networks and for simulating the kinetic evolution of the underlying systems. In particular, the lecturers will present the theory of large networks useful for describing the structure of interactions, two alternative simulation techniques based on differential equations and on stochastic process calculus, and the predictive methods based on machine learning approaches.

Issues related to the techniques for parametrizing the models starting from the experimental data will be discussed in detail.


These topics will cover half- or one-day tutorials that will present both the theoretical and the applicative aspects, with the aim of highlighting the usefulness and the domain of application of the different approaches in the field of Systems Biology.