In the last decade, advances in life sciences have gathered a vast amount of experimental information about biological systems at cellular and sub-cellular levels. Now we are facing a big challenge: how do we interpret, analyse the experimental information and relate it to the functions of life? Can we reconstruct biological systems from such detailed information? There is a strong motivation behind this. A biological system is an integral system, within which components interact with each other. The interaction coordinates the simple behaviours of a biological system at cellular and sub-cellular levels into more complicated behaviours at tissue and organ levels. To understand the functions of a biological system, one has to synthesize the detailed, but isolated biological information obtained at cellular and sub-cellular systems into an interactive system at tissue and organ levels.

Recently, developments in non-linear science, modern physics of excitable medium, applied mathematics, together with availability of supercomputing power, have provided powerful tools to integrate detailed biological information into an interactive system. This forms a new exciting research area – reconstruction of virtual biological systems: from cell to organ.