The adaptive landscape is a black box
  This picture symbolizes much of what we know about the adaptive landscape: Fascinating, important looking, but mostly in the dark and hard to quantify. At this stage we often don't even know what axes to use, let alone how to navigate this maze. A key goal of EvoSysBio is to quantify various aspects of the adaptive landscape to improve our understanding of is important metaphor for evolutionary biology.
 
 

 


Nothing in biology makes sense
except when properly quantified in the light of evolution.

Evolutionary systems biology aims to bring together the rich mechanistic details of current systems biology and the long-standing quantitative experience in evolutionary genetics in order to increase the quantitative rigor of biological analyses.

Since current systems biology means many things to many people, it is perhaps inevitable that evolutionary systems biology might be even broader. A potentially useful framework that goes beyond comparative analyses of systems biology data was described recently and centers around a research program to quantify the adaptive landscape (Loewe, 2009).

If you are interested in related work, you may want to attend the upcoming

Workshop on Evolutionary Systems Biology

which will be held in association with the International Conference on Systems Biology (ICSB) at the 15th Oct 2010 in Edinburgh, UK.

 

References
Loewe L (2009) A framework for evolutionary systems biology. BMC Systems Biology 3:27. Journal Link

Ibarra, R. U., Edwards, J. S., & Palsson, B. O. (2002) Escherichia coli K-12 undergoes adaptive evolution to achieve in silico predicted optimal growth. Nature 420, 186-9. PubMed

Wagner A (2008) "Neutralism and selectionism: a network-based reconciliation.", Nat Rev Genet 9:965-74. PubMed