摘要：The post-genomic era is characterized by a gold-rush mood, because many previously separate disciplines, ranging from biology and biochemistry to physics, mathematics and computer sciences, have grown together and contribute to the generation of enormous amounts of experimental and theoretical data. These data are published in journals and often collected in electronic data repositories. Such resources provide, as a challenge for intelligent data mining, many potential chances to create new knowledge and to gain insights into complex biological systems. One approach of, for example, systems biologists, is not only to depict the cellular metabolic pathways such as those drawn in the well-known Boehringer poster or the KEGG pathway map but to enter in the third dimension with a higher level of information such as the e-cell project (Tomita et al., 1999, Takahashi et al., 2004). Apart to the basic scientific understanding of metabolic networks the application of these digitized maps can also be useful for the simulation of the treatment of diseases such as diabetes which could lead to the development of new “intelligent” drugs (Werner, 2002).
