Systems Biology And Network Medicine: An Integrated Approach To Redox Biology And Pathobiology

The oxidative-reductive (redox) system and their components are essential in maintaining biological homeostasis, and disturbances in redox balance form the basis of many pathologic processes. The redox components are actively present in all organ systems across different tissue and cell types, subcellular organelles, and their subcompartments. While the actions and regulations of various redox elements are viewed highly compartmentalized, the interactions among them within and across these compartments are important considerations in view of many reactions and their downstream consequences that permeate through the structural boundaries. During the past decade, we have developed an unprecedented ability to generate large-scale, systems-level molecular data across many biological dimensions. Systems biology and network medicine approaches provide a novel framework that enables the dynamic integration of numerous redox components and their interactions across multiple biological compartments. In this chapter, we introduce the key concepts of network medicine and biological networks and discuss specific ways in which it is accelerating our compressive understanding of redox biology and pathobiology in this multiomic era.