Grand network convergence

A report of the Systems Biology: Networks meeting, Cold Spring Harbor, USA, 22-26 March 2011. The success of the human genome project has provided a model for an analogous interactome project to map how proteins, genes, metabolites and other regulatory components interact to transform a biochemical soup into a living system. These maps promise to serve as a framework for models that predict how a biological system responds to a perturbation or an input, which is relevant to gene mutations and therapeutic treatment in human disease, and as a framework for designing new systems in synthetic biology. Three major themes arose during the 2011 meeting: technological drivers and data generation, algorithmic advances, and convergence on biological applications with context-sensitive networks.