Systems Theoretic Approach to Systems and Synthetic Biology I: Models and System Characterizations

Recent advances in systems and synthetic biology clearly demonstrate the benefits of a rigorous and systematic approach rooted in the principles of systems and control theory - not only does it lead to exciting insights and discoveries but it also reduces the inordinately lengthy trial-and-error process of wet-lab experimentation, thereby facilitating significant savings in human and financial resources. So far, state-of-the-art systems-and-control-theory-inspired results in systems and synthetic biology have been scattered across various books and journals from various disciplines. This edited book provides a panoramic view and illustrates the potential of such systematic and rigorous mathematical methods in systems and synthetic biology. The book-chapters demonstrate how systems and control theoretic concepts and techniques can be useful or should evolve to be useful, in our quest to understand how biological systems function and/or how they can be (re-)designed from the bottom-up to yield new biological systems that have rigorously characterised robustness and performance properties. The book presents 24 book chapters contributed by leading researchers in systems and synthetic biology that illustrate how biologists as well as systems and control theorists can collaborate to make deep and timely contributions in interdisciplinary life science research on how to devise experiments to obtain models of biological systems, how to obtain predictive models using information extracted from experimental data, how to choose components for (re-)engineering biological networks, how to adequately interconnect biological systems and so on. As the eminent computer scientist Donald Knuth put it, "biology easily has 500 years of exciting problems to work on". This book presents but a small fraction of those for the benefit of (1) systems and control theorists interested in molecular and cellular biology and (2) biologists interested in rigorous modelling, analysis and control of biological systems.