Hauke Busch (Junior Fellow, School of Life Sciences - LifeNet): "My God, it's full of genes" - A Network Odyssey through Cell Biology

The human cell is a complex system beyond comprehension to current science. Unraveling this complexity will make us understand how life emerges through the individual interactions of thousands of genes and proteins, creating a living cell on the macroscopic level. In this talk I present concepts from Synergetics and Network 
theory through which we hope to gain systematic insight into the complexity and self-organization of biological systems. Network Biology allows for a unifying description of complex networks irrespective of the nature of the individual parts. Complex systems follow the same rules in general. Hence, studying social networks or the internet will help to understand the gene interaction networks in a cell, because they share similar properties and can be described with the same language. Synergetics deals with the general principles how self-organization arises in complex systems and how they are controlled by a few decisive parameters, only. Taken both ideas together, we show how to combine a large-scale description of cellular behavior with the identification of individual protein and gene interactions, granting us the control over a cell's decision to divide, differentiate or die.