From Looking at the Parts of a System to a System of Parts

There's a shift in biomedical research--a change of perspective from looking at parts of biology to trying to understand changes and responses more holistically across the whole living system, at least throughout a whole cell. Technology paved the way for this change with DNA microarrays and high throughput DNA sequencing which enabled researchers to assess genetic changes in many thousands of different molecules in a single experiment.

However, genes are just one component cells. There are proteins, metabolites, lipids, sugars, etc.  Techniques are necessary to measure all types of molecules in a broad-scale universal manner.  It is this next generation technology that will revolutionize our understanding of biological development and disease progression.

Read more about Systems Biology and Next Generation Technology.