MEETING REPORT SupraBiology 2014: Promoting UK-China collaboration on Systems Biology and High Performance Computing Ettore Murabito 1 , Riccardo Colombo 2,3 , Chengkun Wu 4 , Malkhey Verma 4 , Samrina Rehman 4 , Jacky Snoep 4 , Shao-Liang Peng 5 , Naiyang Guan 5 , Xiangke Liao 5, * and Hans V. Westerhoff 4, * 1 Manchester Institute of Biotechnology, School of Computer Science, Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences, Manchester Centre for Integrative Systems Biology, The University of Manchester, Manchester, M139PL, United Kingdom. 2 Department of Informatics, Systems and Communication, University of Milan-Bicocca, Milan, 20126, Italy. 3 SYSBIO – Centre of Systems Biology, Milan, 20126, Italy. 4 Manchester Institute of Biotechnology, School of Chemical Engineering and Analytical Sciences, Manchester Centre for Integrative Systems Biology, The University of Manchester, Manchester, M139PL, United Kingdom. 5 School of Computer Science, National University of Defence Technology, Changsha 410073, China * Correspondence: xkliao@nudt.edu.cn, hans.westerhoff@manchester.ac.uk Received January 27, 2015; In the second half of 2014 the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology, based in Manchester (UK), hosted the first SupraBiology congress, an event attended by representa- tives of different academic institutions and industry based in both the UK and China. The congress was aimed to serve as a platform to discuss and promote potential collaborations between the UK and China on the subject of Systems Biology and High Performance Computing. The event, sponsored by the “BBSRC China Partnering Awards” and ISBE, was organised as a sequence of talks addressing the different aspects of Systems Biology that can benefit from High Performance Computing. A general discussion session followed where the scientific, techni- cal, and logistic aspects of the prospected UK-China collaborations were examined. In what follows we summarize the contributions of the different attendees to the congress. In particular, the material hereby presented is organized around five main areas of interest:  Systems Biology in medicine  Computational methods of Systems Biology  Computational Biology for Industry  Computational Systems Biology in Education  Computational Biology on the Tianhe-2 Supercom- puter The report ends with a discussion section relating the ideas that have been pushed forward to establish collaborations between UK and China. INTRODUCTION Systems Biology is an interdisciplinary field that studies the complex interactions occurring within biological systems, and how such interactions give rise to the emergent properties of life. Systems Biology deals with overwhelming amounts of data, harvested through different high-throughput techniques (e.g., proteomics, metabolomics, genomics). Because of the inherent complexity of living organisms — resulting from the tight interconnectedness of their components, Systems Biology needs to invoke modelling and systems theory so as to understand the mechanism of emergence. The challenge that Systems Biology rises to consists of discovering the principles that govern the behaviour of biological systems based on such corpuses of data of such complexity. This has profound implications in every biology-related field: from industrial production of biomaterials to personalized medicine to bioenergy. Some important research-lines are today hampered by the lack of adequate computing power within the relevant institutions. The ability to solve advanced computation problems in an expendable time-scale makes high- © Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015 1 Quantitative Biology DOI 10.1007/s40484-015-0039-9