First Digital Simulation of an Entire Life Form

An anonymous reader writes "LiveScience is reporting on what appears to be the first digital simulation of an entire life form. Researchers created more than a million digital atoms to reverse engineer the satellite tobacco mosaic virus, a relatively simple organism. But is it really a life form? From the article: 'Viruses are tiny bundles of protein and genetic material that straddle the line between life and non-life. Many scientists prefer to call them "particles" because even though they contain RNA or DNA like other lifeforms, they can only replicate inside other living cells.'"

Comments

Simulation of an entire lifeform, my ass!

[Expert Determination]

This is such a misleading headline. It's a simulation of the dynamics of the proteins forming the outer case of the virus to understand how it maintains its structure. It's purely about studying the structure - like an engineer's finite element simulation of a bridge. It's great work from this point of view. But it's not a simulation of any kind of biological process because the time scale is something like nanoseconds. So yes, it's a simulation, but it's not a simulation of a lifeform qua a lifeform.

And that word 'lifeform' - it brings the quality of the reporting down to the level of Star Trek psychobabble. Try 'organsim', or even 'virus', next time.

Why virii are not alive

[chrisjbuck]

A (biological) virus does not eat or photosynthesize or have any metabolism at all. That's why they are virus particles, other than the slow degradation of all complex molecules if you have a tube full of virii they will just sit in the tube forever. Doing nothing. If you add sugar, protein, complex carbohydrates and sunlight to the tube of virii they will... sit there. Doing nothing. Not eating. Not metabolizing. Not replicating. Living things would either die, metabolize, or replicate, the virii do not. The virii does contain genetic information, if inserted into a cell the information is used to hijack the cell into making more copies of the virus. The virus may only encode a handful of proteins, but it uses the ribosomes and other protein building apparatus of the infected cell to make the viral proteins, and more copies of the viral genetic info (DNA or RNA) which is packaged and released from the cell (sometimes killing the cell in the process, sometimes not). Does this mean the virus is alive? All the protein synthesis, and packaging of the virus is done by the infected cell, the virus does not technically replicate itself, which is part of what we define as "life as we know it". They are not dead they just exist as a glitch. A primordial cell probably had a mutation that produced lots of particles that happened to be capable of causing the same glitch in other cells they encountered, virii are perhaps analagous to a "goto" loop that somehow copies itself to other programs, more than to actual computer viruses which imitate their biological namesake only to a certain degree. Maybe when the sony robot dogs start giving each other roborabies via bluetooth the analogy will be closer... IAABC - I am a biochemist - but genetic coding is still trickier than php scripting :P