The book deals with engineering aspects of the two emerging and intertwined fields of synthetic and systems biology. Both fields hold promise to revolutionize the way molecular biology research is done, the way today 's drug discovery works and the way bio-engineering is done. Both fields stress the importance of building and characterizing small bio-molecular networks in order to synthesize incrementally and understand large complex networks inside living cells. Reminiscent of computer-aided design (CAD) of electronic circuits, abstraction is believed to be the key concept to achieve this goal. It allows hiding the overwhelming complexity of cellular processes by encapsulating network parts into abstract modules. This book provides a unique perspective on how concepts and methods from CAD of electronic circuits can be leveraged to overcome complexity barrier perceived in synthetic and systems biology.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Computational Methods in Systems Biology, CMSB 2017, held in Darmstadt, Germany, in September 2017. The 15 full papers, 4 tool papers and 4 posters presented together with 1 invited talk were carefully reviewed and selected from 41 regular paper submissions. Topics of interest include formalisms for modeling biological processes; models and their biological applications; frameworks for model verication, validation, analysis, and simulation of biological systems; high-performance computational systems biology and parallel implementations; model inference from experimental data; model integration from biological databases; multi-scale modeling and analysis methods; and computational approaches for synthetic biology.

The book deals with engineering aspects of the two emerging and intertwined fields of synthetic and systems biology. Both fields hold promise to revolutionize the way molecular biology research is done, the way today's drug discovery works and the way bio-engineering is done. Both fields stress the importance of building and characterizing small bio-molecular networks in order to synthesize incrementally and understand large complex networks inside living cells. Reminiscent of computer-aided design (CAD) of electronic circuits, abstraction is believed to be the key concept to achieve this goal. It allows hiding the overwhelming complexity of cellular processes by encapsulating network parts into abstract modules. This book provides a unique perspective on how concepts and methods from CAD of electronic circuits can be leveraged to overcome complexity barrier perceived in synthetic and systems biology.