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Chemical biology and the limits of reductionism

Chemical biology and systems biology have grown and evolved in parallel during the past decade, but the mindsets of the two disciplines remain quite different. As the inevitable intersections between the disciplines become more frequent, chemical biology has an opportunity to assimilate the most powerful ideas from systems biology. Can the integrationist mindset of systems biology liberate chemical biology from the compulsion to reduce everything to individual small molecule–target pairings?

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Figure 1: Evolving uses for systematic data collection.
Figure 2: Is chemical biology biased toward reductionism?
Figure 3: Bridging the in vitroin vivo divide.

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Acknowledgements

I thank J. Chen, P. Clemons, D. Kokel, C. MacRae and G. Sorensen for their stimulating ideas and comments on the manuscript, and S. Kim for technical assistance with manuscript preparation.

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Peterson, R. Chemical biology and the limits of reductionism. Nat Chem Biol 4, 635–638 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nchembio1108-635

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