Trypanosoma brucei: meet the system

African trypanosomes cause devastating diseases in humans and domestic animals. The parasites evolved early in the eukaryotic lineage and have numerous biochemical peculiarities that distinguish them from other systems. These include unconventional mechanisms for expressing nuclear and mitochondrial genes as well as unusual subcellular localizations for a variety of enzymes. Systems biology has arisen partly to allow contextualization of the massive datasets that describe individual chemical parts of biological systems. Here we describe recent efforts to collect and analyse data pertaining to all aspects of the trypanosome's biochemical physiology that go some way to describing the parasite as an integrated system.