An Introduction to Systems Biology: Design Principles of Biological Circuits (Chapman & Hall/Crc Mathematical and Computational Biology) | 
| Author: Uri Alon
Publisher: Chapman & Hall/CRC
List Price: $57.95
Buy New: $46.36
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Rating:  8 reviews
Sales Rank: 64848
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Pages: 320
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.8 x 7 x 0.7
ISBN: 1584886420
Dewey Decimal Number: 570.285
EAN: 9781584886426
ASIN: 1584886420
Publication Date: July 7, 2006
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Product Description
This bookpresents recently discovered design principles that govern the structure and behavior of biological networks such as gene circuits, highlighting simple, recurring circuit elements that make up the network. It provides a quantitative theory for which circuits are found in a given environment and a mathematical framework for understanding and even designing biological circuits. The book requires only basic mathematics and includes a review of the necessary background material. It fills a significant need for a textbook and introduction to the concepts, principles, and mathematical tools that will form the basis of future developments in the field.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 8
An Amazing Book April 17, 2009
Jason Dowd (Los Angeles, CA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
If you have any interest in how life actually works, you should read this book. It weighs in at less than 300 pages, which makes it very approachable. But it manages to pack a wide array of fascinating material into those pages.
Life is complicated. And there is no reason to expect it to be readily comprehensible. Yet over the last few decades we have found that biological systems make extensive and repetitive use of certain patterns of functionality, and that these patterns often embody good design principles as practiced by human engineers.
Concepts such as modularity, robustness, and even optimality are found to be reflected in biological systems and exploitable to make verifiable predictions about how biological systems operate experimentally.
It is worth noting that while this book is deeply fascinating, it is not math free. Indeed the author began his career as a mathematician and the reader will find it helpful to have some knowledge of basic ordinary differential equations, calculus, and elementary algebra. On the other hand, very little if any biochemistry is required.
Fascinating! January 31, 2009
Yegor Voronin (Seattle, WA USA)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
What a great book! If you have any interest in how biological systems function and what principles lay in their most basic designs, you must read it!
It's very clearly written. I think almost everyone will find it accessible and interesting, no matter what your education level is or your primary field (but I think engineers will get a particular kick out of it). There is quite a bit of math, but it's very basic and even if you skip all of it, you will still learn a lot from the book.
I found the whole subject fascinating and intriguing. Sure, biological systems are not as simple as this book may seem to portray, but there is no doubt in my mind that the ideas presented here are quite relevant to biology and indeed underlay many of the real-world biological phenomena.
Awesome book January 10, 2009
eyeinzsky75 (US)
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
Awesome book! The author did a great job in presenting the topics in an easy and enjoyable way.
Excellent serious book about biology -- no chemistry needed. July 23, 2008
George Stanton (New York, NY USA)
18 out of 18 found this review helpful
This is a great book for learning about how biology works. I've been wanting to learn a bit more about biology, and I've read many of the popularized science books on the subject. Most serious biology books require a pretty good understanding of organic chemistry. (At first that didn't seem like a problem, after all organic chemistry is just regular chemistry with a bunch of carbon atoms lying around, but the jargon gets so dense that you lose track of what's going on.) This book offers an entirely different perspective on biology that is much more accessible to someone with a general interest in science.
This book looks at biology from the perspective of how genes and proteins interact at a network level, rather than a chemical level. It's a lot like learning electronics -- you can understand a lot about a transistor without knowing how semiconductors work. After explaining the operation of some of the most common network "motifs" the author talks about why those motifs were favored by evolution, in particular what makes them robust and how can they act to minimize errors. The book leaves you with the very interesting question of what characteristics might be different between an engineered system and an evolved one?
The language of the book is very clear, this is a technical book you could easily read for fun. The math is simple, just a little calculus, and if you don't care about the math you can just look at the diagrams.
Excellent stuff! December 28, 2007
gani999 (Grenoble, France)
6 out of 8 found this review helpful
I am a macromolecular crystallographer interested in theoretical systems biology, and this book is a real goldmine. It explains all the concepts behind biochemical systems and networks in a clear, lucid language. This book is a pleasure to read, for both biologists and mathematicians alike.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 8
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