The ensemble approach to understand genetic regulatory networks

Understanding the genetic regulatory network comprising genes, RNA, proteins and the network connections and dynamical control rules among them, is a major task of contemporary systems biology. I focus here on the use of the ensemble approach to find one or more well-defined ensembles of model networks whose statistical features match those of real cells and organisms. Such ensembles should help to explain and predict features of real cells and organisms. (C) 2004 Published by Elsevier B.V.