The volume focuses on the genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and bioinformatics of a single cell, especially lymphocytes and on understanding the molecular mechanisms of systems immunology. Based on the author’s personal experience, it provides revealing insights into the potential applications, significance, workflow, comparison, future perspectives and challenges of single-cell sequencing for identifying and developing disease-specific biomarkers in order to understand the biological function, activation and dysfunction of single cells and lymphocytes and to explore their functional roles and responses to therapies. It also provides detailed information on individual subgroups of lymphocytes, including cell characters, function, surface markers, receptor function, intracellular signals and pathways, production of inflammatory mediators, nuclear receptors and factors, omics, sequencing, disease-specific biomarkers, bioinformatics, networks and dynamic networks, their role in disease and future prospects. Dr. Xiangdong Wang is a Professor of Medicine, Director of Shanghai Institute of Clinical Bioinformatics, Director of Fudan University Center for Clinical Bioinformatics, Director of the Biomedical Research Center of Zhongshan Hospital, Deputy Director of Shanghai Respiratory Research Institute, Shanghai, China.

With the rapid development of biotechnologies, single-cell sequencing has become an important tool for understanding the molecular mechanisms of diseases, defining cellular heterogeneities and characteristics, and identifying intercellular communications and single-cell-based biomarkers. Providing a clear overview of the clinical applications, the book presents state-of-the-art information on immune cell function, cancer progression, infection, and inflammation gained from single-cell DNA or RNA sequencing. Furthermore, it explores the role of target gene methylation in the pathogenesis of diseases, with a focus on respiratory cancer, infection and chronic diseases. As such it is a valuable resource for clinical researchers and physicians, allowing them to refresh their knowledge and improve early diagnosis and therapy for patients.

This book presents an overview of the recent technologies in single molecule and single cell sequencing. These sequencing technologies are revolutionizing the way of the genomic studies and the understanding of complex biological systems. The PacBio sequencer has enabled extremely long-read sequencing and the MinION sequencer has made the sequencing possible in developing countries. New developments and technologies are constantly emerging, which will further expand sequencing applications. In parallel, single cell sequencing technologies are rapidly becoming a popular platform. This volume presents not only an updated overview of these technologies, but also of the related developments in bioinformatics. Without powerful bioinformatics software, where rapid progress is taking place, these new technologies will not realize their full potential. All the contributors to this volume have been involved in the development of these technologies and software and have also made significant progress on their applications. This book is intended to be of interest to a wide audience ranging from genome researchers to basic molecular biologists and clinicians.

Immuno Systems Biology aims to study the immune system in the more integrated manner on how cells and molecules participate at different system levels to the immune function. Through this book Kumar Selvarajoo introduces to physicists, chemists, computer scientists, biologists and immunologists the idea of an integrated approach to the understanding of mammalian immune system. Geared towards a researcher with limited immunological and computational analytical experience, the book provides a broad overview to the subject and some instruction in basic computational, theoretical and experimental approaches. The book links complex immunological processes with computational analysis and emphasizes the importance of immunology to the mammalian system.

Many potential applications of synthetic and systems biology are relevant to the challenges associated with the detection, surveillance, and responses to emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases. On March 14 and 15, 2011, the Institute of Medicine's (IOM's) Forum on Microbial Threats convened a public workshop in Washington, DC, to explore the current state of the science of synthetic biology, including its dependency on systems biology; discussed the different approaches that scientists are taking to engineer, or reengineer, biological systems; and discussed how the tools and approaches of synthetic and systems biology were being applied to mitigate the risks associated with emerging infectious diseases. The Science and Applications of Synthetic and Systems Biology is organized into sections as a topic-by-topic distillation of the presentations and discussions that took place at the workshop. Its purpose is to present information from relevant experience, to delineate a range of pivotal issues and their respective challenges, and to offer differing perspectives on the topic as discussed and described by the workshop participants. This report also includes a collection of individually authored papers and commentary.

The rapid development of new methods for immunological data collection – from multicolor flow cytometry, through single-cell imaging, to deep sequencing – presents us now, for the first time, with the ability to analyze and compare large amounts of immunological data in health, aging and disease. The exponential growth of these datasets, however, challenges the theoretical immunology community to develop methods for data organization and analysis. Furthermore, the need to test hypotheses regarding immune function, and generate predictions regarding the outcomes of medical interventions, necessitates the development of mathematical and computational models covering processes on multiple scales, from the genetic and molecular to the cellular and system scales. The last few decades have seen the development of methods for presentation and analysis of clonal repertoires (those of T and B lymphocytes) and phenotypic (surface-marker based) repertoires of all lymphocyte types, and for modeling the intricate network of molecular and cellular interactions within the immune systems. This e-Book, which has first appeared as a ‘Frontiers in Immunology’ research topic, provides a comprehensive, online, open access snapshot of the current state of the art on immune system modeling and analysis.