9. Dynamic Modeling
Yu-Chao Wang
Institute of Biomedical Informatics, National Yang-Ming University, Taiwan
[email protected]- Introduction
Biological modeling is the activity of translating a biological system into
mathematics for subsequent analysis. In the field of systems biology,
the end goal of biological modeling is to understand the interactions
between the components of the system and to have a fully predictive
description of the system, that is, computational simulations are guaranteed
to be accurate representations of real behavior of the biological system.
To this end, differential equations are the most common mathematical
tools to model biological systems. Briefly, mathematical models can be
classified into two categories: static models where the variables of the
system do not change in time, and dynamic models which account for
time-dependent changes of the system.^1 Since most biological systems are
time-dependent and the dynamic behaviors are crucial for understanding
biological mechanisms, we will focus on the dynamic models in this chapter.
In the previous chapters, the generation and analysis of high-throughput
biological data such as transcriptomics, quantitative proteomics, and phos-
phoproteomics are introduced. Here, we will introduce the procedure of
dynamic modeling and the use of dynamic modeling to analyze those high-
throughput data for understanding the interactions/regulations between
the components of biological systems, i.e., constructing the biological
networks.
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