Integrating Bioinformatics and Systems Biology for Exploring Novel Lipid Pathways in Infectious Diseases

Systems Biology aims to define biological problems using the language of mathematics. With the advancement of high throughput technologies and their ever expanding capabilities to generate large scale “-omics” data, the basic goal of systems biology would be to integrate global data sets and develop a coherent understanding to the biological system under study. Biological interactions are highly complex where the components of the systems are connected in a highly intricate manner. Mathematical modeling plays a major role in capturing the dynamics of each and every component in the system, simplifying complex biological networks. In the field of infectious diseases, system level understanding is essential to gain valuable insights into the pathogenic processes. A thorough understanding of the perturbations in biological networks may aid in prioritizing of the drug targets. Schistosomiasis and Trypanosomiasis remain as the two neglected tropical diseases affecting human population worldwide. The central theme of this work revolves around developing a systems level understanding of the lipid metabolism of these two parasites, abstracting complex biological processes as a collection of interacting functions driven in time by a set of discrete biological events. An insight has been laid into the importance and application of systems biology which is emerging as an amalgamation of two important sciences “Mathematics” and “Biology”.

Keywords: Drug repositioning, gene regulatory network, graph theory, kinetic laws, kinetic modeling, mathematical modeling, metabolic pathway, neglected tropical diseases, schistosomiasis, stochastic simulation, systems biology, trypanosomiasis.