Theoretical biology/External Links

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• Department of Theoretical Biology, University of Vienna, Austria
• Group of Theoretical Biology at the Botanical Institute of the University of Bonn

• Theoretical Biology searches to discover characteristic principles of order within the variety of biological phenomena by describing the organizational dynamics of living systems in a formal way. In addition to a more profound understanding of single phenomena, it has brought about new starting points in the search for answers to the most fundamental questions in biology: What is life? How did the organisms evolve? How to explain the tremendous complexity and variety of living systems?
• Theoretical Biology is rooted in the times of the Enlightenment. However, it started to prosper only in this century. At the beginning, Johannes Reinke, Julius Schaxel, and Jakob von Uexküll formulated the concept of Theoretical Biology for the first time. In the twenties and thirties, Fisher, Haldane, Lotka, Volterra, v. Bertalanffy, and others founded the modern type of a mathematically oriented Theoretical Biology by developing population genetics, population ecology, and general systems theory. Nowadays, it has infiltrated almost every field in biology.
• Despite of being independent, Theoretical Biology stays in intimate dialogue with experimental biological research. However, in contrast to the latter it uses mathematics as its language and computers as the most important tools - very similar to Theoretical Physics, which gave some important impulses during its development. By allowing simulations, computers help to understand very complex processes, intuitively, thus complementing the mathematical analysis of simplified models. In addition, philosophical and epistemological questions are investigated in Theoretical Biology. The precise definition of biological terms and the characterization of cognition by using formal systems, in general, are fundamental tasks of Theoretical Biology now and in future.
• Theoretical Biology is naturally interdisciplinary. It draws ideas from other disciplines and, in reverse, supports them by quantification and precision. Therefore, it is on the way to become a general and extensive structural science of organized systems, which might be able to point out similarities between the organization of physico-chemical, biological, economical, and social systems.

• Theoretical Biology & Bioinformatics, Utrecht University

• Biotic systems are complex dynamic information processing systems in which processes on many space and time scales interact. Our aim is to understand them as such. To this end we develop and analyze mathematical/computational models of a broad range of biological systems. In the seventies we coined the term bioinformatics for the study of informatic processes in biotic systems. According to the Oxford English Dictionary this was the first use of the term bioinformatics. The concept provides us with a unified framework for a research area for which a variety of names have now become fashionable, which includes, apart from bioinformatics ss (i.e. data-analysis of e.g. genomic data), the dynamic modeling approaches referred to as ``systems biology, ``computational life sciences, ``computational biology, and which partially overlaps with ``complex systems research and ``Artifical Life. Our formalisms range from mathematical models, cellular automata, genetic algorithms, to discrete-event individual-oriented simulation models. The research of our group is part of the Life Sciences and Biocomplexity and the Infection and Immunity focus areas of the Utrcecht University.

Theoretical Biology, Institute of Biology Leiden

• Our goal is to pursue fruitful and active research in the area of theoretical biology and the related disciplines of computational biology and bioinformatics, focussing on Evolutionary Dynamics.