**11. Approaches of systems biology**

The rise of genomic technologies and systems biology provide fresh approaches to currently untactable biological processes that are at the root of serious environmental problems. One formidable challenge in this respect is the biological fate of the nearly 8 operons, etc. implicated in this process. The biodegradation database of the University of Minnesota documented new chemical compounds (~40 000 predominant) which are common in modern Organic and Industrial Chemistry. A large number of microbial strains are able to grow on environmental pollutants (about 800 today). Bioremediation was studied from a molecular biology point of view, characterizing the chemical reactions, genes; University of Minnesota has made a pioneering effort in putting together nearly every aspect of our current knowledge on biodegradation pathways and in developing systems for dealing with that data e.g. to learn rules for predicting biodegradative features. Yet, most information available in the literature of microbial biodegradation of xenobiotics and recalcitrant chemicals deals with duos con‐ sisting of one pollutant versus one strain and thus, lacks essential aspects of the natural scenarios, like the interchange of genes between bacteria or their metabolic cooperation. This study of genomes and 'functionomes' from a community point of view (in contrast to organism point of view) is leading, for example, to the sequencing of 'genomes' of communities and ecosystems, instead of single organisms. These circumstances expose the need to qualify and to represent the information available in biodegradation databases in a fashion in which the entire known biodegradative potential of the microbial world can be crossed with the whole collection of compounds known to be partially or totally degraded through (mostly) bacterial action (Kitano 2002).
