Systems Biology

Here is an interesting quote form my school's site that a professor recently pointed out in class:

... systems are more than a sum of the parts, and that nonlinear interactions of components and processes result in emergent properties that can not be predicted from knowledge of the individual components and their behavioral processes.

In lamen's terms, the study of entire biological systems (i.e. looking at all the genes of a cell at once) provides more insight to properties of the system that could not be seen or identified with the old biological dogma of single gene studies.

This is what Bioinformatics has done to the study of Biology. It has transcended the study from a micro exploration of individual gene function to the macro examination of the system as a whole by observing all the parts simultaneously.