Systems Biology and immune aging

Many alterations of innate and adaptive immunity are common in the aging population, which reflect a deterioration of the immune system, and have lead to the terms immune aging or immunosenescence. Systems Biology aims to the comprehensive knowledge of the structure, dynamics, control and design that define a given biological system. Systems Biology benefits from the continuous advances in the omics sciences, based on high-throughput and high-content technologies, as well as on bioinformatic tools for data mining and integration. The Systems Biology approach is becoming gradually used to propose and to test comprehensive models of aging, both at the level of the immune system and the whole organism. In this way, immune aging may be described by a dynamic view of the states and interactions of every individual cell and molecule of the immune system and their role in the context of aging and longevity. This mini-review presents a panoramics of the current strategies, tools and challenges for applying Systems Biology to immune aging. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.