eIMBL systems biology laboratory (eIMBL-SBL) is a multi-national collaboration network that links systems biologists around the Asia-Pacific Rim. eIMBL-SBL puts an emphasis on training of young scientists, exchange of knowledge and resources, and collaboration in the rapidly growing field of systems biology through a web/grid-based infrastructure. Currently, eIMBL-SBL includes about 12 member scientists from over 8 countries across the Asia-Pacific Rim and the list of participants is still growing.

2. The eIMBL-SBL features

- A web-directory of educational and scientific resources in Asia.
- Shared database or modeling tools accessible from internet.
- A scientific discussion forum and a mailing-list.
- Organization and funding of the off-line training and researcher-exchange programs.
- A grid-based work space for collaboration.
- On-line job/scholarship opportunities in the systems biological field.

[ The current eIMBL-SBL network ]

3. What is systems biology?

When loosely defined, systems biology is an effort seeking system-level understanding of biological phenomena of varying orders such as molecules, cells, organs, individuals, or even echo-systems. Most biologists would agree that the "reductionist" approaches sought by "twentieth-century biology" have some serious shortcomings, especially when trying to explain observable biological phenomena by reducing them to interplay of elementary units which characterized in isolation. The traditional approaches failed to grasp the complexity of biological systems and this is why the identification of potential therapeutic targets has been impeded despite the wealth of "omics" data.

[ An example of protein interaction network ]

System-level understanding is becoming the primary goal of biology in the 21st century. System-level understanding seeks to describe all the elements of the system, define the structure of biological networks that interrelate the elements of a system by characterizing the flow of information between them, and finally study the system dynamics to detect emergent properties of the system. Although this holistic approach is not new at all, it has just come into play with the recent progress in collecting large-scale experimental data such as DNA micro-array technique.
In general, systems biology aims at answering the following key questions by integrating large-scale experimental data and computational analysis:
(1) What are the basic structures and properties of a biological network?
(2) How does a biological system behave over time under various conditions?
(3) How does a biological system maintain its robustness and stability?
(4) How can we modify or construct biological systems to achieve desired properties?
Answers to these questions require breakthroughs in the different disciplines such as biology, mathematics, computer science, engineering, and other fields along with rigorous interdisciplinary efforts among them.

4. Members

Head of the eIMBL-SBL
Dr. Do Han Kim (Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, Gwangju, Korea)
E-mail: dhkim@gist.ac.kr
Homepage: http://life.gist.ac.kr/sbl/



Core members
Dr. Kwang-Hyun Cho (Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea)
Homepage: http://systemsbiology.snu.ac.kr

Dr. Sang Yup Lee (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejun, Korea)
Homepage: http://mbel.kaist.ac.kr/

Dr. Young Sook Yoo (Korea Institute of Science and Technology, Seoul, Korea)
Homepage: http://systemsbiology.snu.ac.kr

Dr. Hawoong Jeong (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejun, Korea)
Homepage: http://stat.kaist.ac.kr/

Dr. Shui-Tein Chen (Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan)
Homepage: http://www.genomics.sinica.edu.tw/index.php?t=13&article_id=32

Dr. Eytan Domany (Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel)
Homepage: http://www.weizmann.ac.il/home/fedomany/

Dr. Upinder S. Bhalla (The National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore, India)
Homepage: http://www.ncbs.res.in/~bhalla/index.html

Dr. Masaru Tomita (Keio University, Japan)
Homepage: http://www.iab.keio.ac.jp/en/content/view/34/124/

Dr. Peter J. Hunter (The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand)
Homepage: http://www.bioeng.auckland.ac.nz/People/people_display.php?people_id=353

Dr. Gang Pei (Shanghai Institute for Biological Sciences, Shanghai, China)

Dr. Gianhua Liu (Genome Institute of Singapore, Singapore)

Website administrator
Dr. Seong-Hwan Rho (Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, Gwangju, Korea)
E-mail: celegans@gist.ac.kr