An Introduction to the Integration of Systems Biology and OMICS data for Animal Scientists

Systems biology integrates the data of all the omics studies and provides the avenues to understand the biology of an organism at higher levels like at tissue, organ or organism level. In the last decade, studies of genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics have been carried out. Only a limited amount of this big data has been analyzed, which is mainly focused on the genotype (single nucleotide polymorphism) level like minor allele frequency, copy number variation and structural variants. The analysis in transcriptomics is limited to differentially expressed genes and their ontology. Proteomics is focused on virulent factors, proteins involved in the disease progression and immunomodulation. However, in the case of livestock animals, there is a need to develop pipelines for the analysis of the omics data. With the integration of omics data into systems biology studies, there is a need to develop algorithms to carry out gene interaction and protein interaction studies and to build interaction networks. The pathway analysis of a system requires the well-defined interacting hub and edges of the protein system of an organism. Developing AI-ML models for drug discovery is required to target the pathogens of livestock animals. In the present era, the research is moving towards single-cell sequencing of the cells and tissues to explore the genetic heterogeneity in the micro-environment of the tissue and spatial biology of the tissue. This chapter will introduce the reader to different aspects of omics technology and its role in systems biology for better livestock management.