Motivation: The importance of studying biology at the system level has been well recognized, yet there is no well-defined process or consistent methodology to integrate and represent biological information at this level. To overcome this hurdle, a blending of disciplines such as computer science and biology is necessary.#R##N##R##N#Results: By applying an adapted, sequential software engineering process, a complex biological system (severe acquired respiratory syndrome-coronavirus viral infection) has been reverse-engineered and represented as an object-oriented software system. The scalability of this object-oriented software engineering approach indicates that we can apply this technology for the integration of large complex biological systems.#R##N##R##N#Availability: A navigable web-based version of the system is freely available at http://people.musc.edu/~zhengw/SARS/Software-Process.htm#R##N##R##N#Contact: zhengw@musc.edu#R##N##R##N#Supplementary information: Supplemental data: Table 1 and Figures 1--16.
['Daniel Shegogue', 'W. Jim Zheng']
Object-oriented biological system integration: a SARS coronavirus example