The Importance of Mathematics in Systems Biology

Douglas B. Kell, School of Chemistry and The Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre, University of Manchester and Chief Executive of the BBSRC Modern biology is predictive and quantitative, and thereby necessarily mathematical [1]. Even the largely qualitative era of molecular biology and genetics could not have happened without mathematics and computation – witness the importance of the Fourier transform in X-ray crystallography [2] and indeed in modern mass spectrometries (see e.g.[3]). Modern genetics is highly quantitative (e.g. [4; 5] – and needs to be [6] http://blogs.bbsrc.ac.uk/index.php/2008/12/when-genetics -meets-the-environment/). As part of this special issue on ‘Whither Mathematics in the UK?’, I have chosen to pick Systems Biology as an exemplar with which to illustrate some of the challenges we face in biology, and how mathematics (which I take to include related numerical disciplines such as statistics, probability, computation, algorithmics and so on) can assist us in meeting them and thereby helping us to understand biological systems in a quantitative and predictive manner. Note the existence of chemometrics (e.g. [7; 8]) as an entire field that covers the application of mathematical methods to problems of (bio)chemistry. The balkanisation of the science and its literature [9-13] means that chem(o)informatics [14; 15] is seen (and has developed) as a discipline largely separate from chemometrics!