Reddit reviews An Introduction to Systems Biology: Design Principles of Biological Circuits (Chapman & Hall/CRC Mathematical and Computational Biology)

If it's modeling you're interested in, I found Uri Alon's Introduction to Systems Biology: Design Principles of Biological Circuits to be a good starting place

An Introduction to Systems Biology: Design Principles of Biological Circuits seems like a popular choice. Does anyone here happen to know this one?

Courses:

Take population genetics and computational biology. Population genetics focuses on dynamics of allele frequencies in different populations. Computational biology is anything from simulating networks of biochemical reactions to identifying patterns in DNA using hidden markov models.


Books:

http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Systems-Biology-Mathematical-Computational/dp/1584886420/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1299531700&sr=8-1

http://www.amazon.com/Biological-Sequence-Analysis-Probabilistic-Proteins/dp/0521629713/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1299531747&sr=1-1

Yea just check it out. It might seem that way from the perspective of cell bio and undergrad bio, but even great papers of hardcore cell bio have mathematical models for differentiation, signaling networks, and such. Bioinformatics has plenty of examples with graph theory, linear algebra, optimization problems, error functions. Also check out charlestondance's post.
Here are some good books.

Math Bio II

Biological circuits/networks

Let me recommend An Introduction to Systems Biology: Design Principles of Biological Circuits by Uri Alon. This book is extremely well-written and approaches cellular systems from the perspective of an engineer or physicist. It will help to orient you to the "big picture" of how cells work without swamping you in molecular details. Systems biology is a hot, emerging field at the intersection of molecular biology, biophysics, and computational biology. Feel free to PM me if you're interested in the field and want a few suggestions about which are the top labs.

I would recommend getting more information about the molecular details elsewhere. I haven't read Alberts, but it seems like a classic text (I often see it on bookshelves). I read Watson's Molecular Biology of the Gene, and thought it was quite good.

For a biochemical perspective, I recommend Stryer's Biochemistry, which covers many common biological molecules. It is a very readable classic and serves as a good reference text. It should give you an idea of how the molecular machines operate on a chemical level.

You can probably find these in your school's library.

Edit: Just realized this post is 3 months old (hah). Hope this helps nevertheless.

I make all of my students read it as well:

http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Systems-Biology-Mathematical-Computational/dp/1584886420

recent lecture at karolinska:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1G0_3lOiSY

and he plays:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhncg6GXYq8