Book excerpt: The convergence of biology and computer science was initially motivated by the need to organize and process a growing number of biological observations resulting from rapid advances in experimental techniques. Today, however, close collaboration between biologists, biochemists, medical researchers, and computer scientists has also generated remarkable benefits for the field of computer science. Systemic Approaches in Bioinformatics and Computational Systems Biology: Recent Advances presents new techniques that have resulted from the application of computer science methods to the organization and interpretation of biological data. The book covers three subject areas: bioinformatics, computational biology, and computational systems biology. It focuses on recent, systemic approaches in computer science and mathematics that have been used to model, simulate, and more generally, experiment with biological phenomena at any scale.