This tutorial is intended to introduce non-specialist researchers in systems biology and in medicine to the best current practices for the analysis of microarray technologies.

When I sit down to write an editorial for Physiology, I flatter myself that the two or three people who will ultimately read it want to hear my thoughts on a “big” topic. It strikes me that, within the rarefied realm of academic biology, there few bigger topics, or at least few topics more all encompassing in their scope, than Systems Biology. Perhaps it is the ambiguity inherent in its name th...

In the last decades, genomic and postgenomic technologies obtained a great amount of information on molecular bases of cell physiology and organization. In spite of this, the knowledge of cells and living organisms in their entirety, is far from being achieved. In order to deal with biological complexity, Systems Biology uses a new approach to overcome this inadequacy. Despite different definit...

We describe the fundamental difference between the nature of problems in traditional physics and that of many problems arising today in systems biology and other complex settings. The difference hinges on the much larger number of a priori plausible alternative laws for explaining the phenomena at hand in the latter case. An approach and a mathematical framework for prediction in this hypothesi...