Editorial - Selected papers from the 2nd international symposium on optimization and systems biology

One of the major challenges for post-genomic biology is to understand how genes, proteins and small molecules interact to form cellular systems. It has been recognised that a complicated living organism cannot be fully understood by merely analysing individual components, and that interactions of those components or networks are ultimately responsible for an organism??s form and functions. Instead of analysing individual components or aspects of the organism, systems biology is the study of an organism, viewed as a dynamical and interacting network of biomolecules which give rise to a complicated life. With increasingly accumulated data from high-throughput technologies, molecular networks and their dynamics have been studied extensively from various aspects of living organisms. Many mathematical methods have been adopted in computational systems biology; in particular, optimisation and statistics play a key role in analysing and understanding biological mechanisms from system-wide viewpoints.