Systems Biology includes the study of interaction networks and, in particular, their dynamic and spatiotemporal aspects. It typically requires the import of concepts from across the disciplines and crosstalk between theory, benchwork, modelling and simulation. The quintessence of Systems Biology is the discovery of the design principles of Life. The logical next step is to apply these principles to synthesize biological systems. This engineering of biology is the ultimate goal of Synthetic Biology: the rational conception and construction of complex systems based on, or inspired by, biology, and endowed with functions that may be absent in Nature.
Open to a wide range of students, postdoctoral fellows and seasoned researchers, this cross-disciplinary Thematic Research School on the Advances in Systems and Synthetic Biology covers five main topics.