Masters in System Biology

ABOUT THE DEPARTMENT

Panjab University, Chandigarh has always taken the lead in starting new courses/departments. From the academic session 2007-2008 the university has introduced a two-year Master programme (M.Sc.) in emerging areas of science and technology i.e. System Biology and Bioinformatics. The admission to this course is on merit basis with specific combination of subjects at the graduation level.

SYSTEM BIOLOGY
System biology is an emerging field that aims at system level understanding of biological systems. Identifying all the genes and proteins in an organism is like listing all parts of an aeroplane. Such a list provides a catalog of the individual components, but, by itself it is not sufficient to understand the complexities underlying the engineered project. But to understand how a particular system functions, one must first examine how the individual components dynamically interact during operation. Thus, it is essential to know the design principles, circuit patterns and how to improve system performance in terms of system structure, system dynamics, control method and design method. Thus, System Biology is an interdisciplinary subject and heavily depends on computational sciences, genomics, bioinformatics measurement technologies and integration of such discoveries with existing knowledge. It has applications in molecular biology, physiology and medicine.