Simply put, systems biology is the study of an organism as a whole rather than as a sum of its parts. Instead of analyzing individual components or aspects of the organism, such as sugar metabolism or a cell nucleus, systems biologists simultaneously study all the components and the interactions among them, all as part of one system.

In this module, students complete the steps scientists take when using systems biology to investigate how organisms induce phenotypic changes in response to the environment. Student teams apply their background knowledge of genetics and networks to experiment with a model organism.

To foster understanding of systems, students first work with a familiar example – a cell phone network. Students manually build a schematic of a cell phone network within the class and learn how the complexity of networks makes their analysis very difficult to perform by hand.

Recent advances in experimental practice, technology development, accompanying computational techniques and systems thinking have advanced biological inquiry. However, the practice of today´s biology does not resemble how biology is taught in today´s high schools. As a potential solution to this mismatch, the Baliga Laboratory at the Institute for Systems Biology is using today’s STEM (science, […]