The ZBSA symposium "Systems Biology.Challenges.Society." is directed both at scientists in the field of life sciences and at experts from industry, telecommunications, information technology, logistics, and medicine. The focus of the symposium is to establish a sustainable transfer of know-how and applications to participants from business and politics beyond specialized scientific disciplines. Therefore the symposium will address research opportunities in systems biology and its potential uses in applied sciences as well as possible areas of application in business.

By combining different branches of science into a new form of science, Systems Biology can provide new, groundbreaking answers to issues that attracted the interest of great minds in the past like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Leonardo Da Vinci and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Using highly advanced methods, Systems Biology has the ability to generate new insights into nature’s modes of operation, permitting conclusions to be drawn about the behavior of organic and inorganic systems. These findings may offer sustainable benefits not only to life sciences research, but also to other fields like telecommunications, information technology, logistics, and medicine.

Our knowledge of organic and inorganic nature has grown exponentially during the past century, and many specialized departments are involved in generating new insights in the context of today’s knowledge-based society. The Center for Systems Biology (ZBSA, Zentrum für Biosystemanalyse) at the Albert-Ludwigs-University of Freiburg is a research center for life sciences that consolidates those specialized departments to answer basic biomedical and biotechnological questions using novel, cutting-edge methods. The accumulated knowledge of member scientists at the ZBSA will create new ways of analyzing and describing nature.

Technological progress and state-of-the-art instruments enable life sciences to collect large quantities of data via high-throughput screening. This data then provides a basis for understanding the interaction or role of specific biochemical processes in life. Computer scientists, mathematicians and physicists engineer instrumentation in order to measure, manage and aggregate those data. Advanced computer technologies help analysts build comprehensive models of living nature at different levels of complexity. These models make it possible to predict and explain highly complex processes in nature as never before.