New Approaches in Data Integration for Systems Chemical Biology

Advances done in “-Omics” technologies in the last 20 years have made available to the researches huge amounts of data spanning a wide variety of biological processes from gene sequences to the metabolites present in a cell at a particular time. The management, analysis and representation of these data have been facilitated by mean of the advances made by biomedical informatics in areas such as data architecture and integration systems. However, despite the efforts done by biologists in this area, research in drug design adds a new level of information by incorporating data related with small molecules, which increases the complexity of these integration systems. Current knowledge in molecular biology has shown that it is possible to use comprehensive and integrative approaches to understand the biological processes from a systems perspective and that pathological processes can be mapped into biological networks. Therefore, current strategies for drug design are focusing on how to interact with or modify those networks to achieve the desired effects on what is called systems chemical biology. In this review several approaches for data integration in systems chemical biology will be analysed and described. Furthermore, because of the increasing relevance of the development and use of nanomaterials and their expected impact in the near future, the requirements of integration systems that incorporate these new data types associated with nanomaterials will also be analysed.