Nathan’s review article, “Moving from capstones toward cornerstones: successes and challenges in applying systems biology to identify mechanisms of autism spectrum disorders”, was just published as part of an E-book by the publisher Frontiers. The book, “Essential Pathways and Circuits of Autism Pathogenesis” is freely available online. Congrats, Nathan!
What is systems biology, you say? It is essentially the process of gathering comprehensive data about an organism, organ, tissue, cell, or cell part, and looking for the “blips” in that data under different conditions. As a simple example, one might look at all of the genes used by skin cells, all of the genes used by hair cells, and then attempt to find just the few of those that are used in just hair cells or just skin cells.