Engineering Approaches Toward Biological Information Integration at the Systems Level

Our understanding of biological systems has improved dramatically due to decades of exploration. This process has been accelerated even further during the past ten years, mainly due to the genome projects, new technologies such as microarray, and developments in proteomics. These advances have generated huge amounts of data describing biological systems from different aspects. Still, integrating this knowledge to reconstruct a biological system in silico has been a significant challenge for biologists, computer scientists, engineers, mathematicians and statisticians. Engineering approaches toward integrating biological information can provide many advantages and capture both the static and dynamic information of a biological system. Methodologies, documentation and project management from the engineering field can be applied. This paper discusses the process, knowledge representation and project management involved in engineering approaches used for biological information integration, mainly using software engineering as an example. Developing efficient courses to educate students to meet the demands of this interdisciplinary approach will also be discussed.