Integrating Bioinformatics and Computational Biology: Perspectives and Possibilities for In Silico Network Reconstruction in Molecular Systems Biology

There is a flood of molecular data about many aspects of cellular functioning. This data ranges from sequence and structural data to gene and protein regulation data, including time dependent changes in the concentration. Integration of the different datasets through computational methods is required to extract biological information that is relevant from a systems biology perspective.

In this paper we discuss how different computational tools and methods can be made to work together integrating different types of data, mining these data for biological information, and assisting in pathway reconstruction and biological hypotheses generation. We review the recent body of literature where such integrative approaches are used and discuss automation of data integration and model building to generate testable biological hypotheses. We analyze issues regarding the design of such automated tools and discuss what limitations and pitfalls can be foreseen for the automation and what solutions can computer science and biologists provide to overcome them.