Slashdot Mirror
Computational Simulations of E.coli
Gearoid_Murphy writes, "BBC news has the story of a scientist who has been using computational models of bacteria to advance our understanding of actual bacteria — a step towards simulating fully fledged organisms in virtual environments and potentially an extraordinarily powerful tool for medical science."
We'll start with bacteria and move our way up to humans! ;)
Hopefully this would eventually allow risky medial treatments to be simulated before they have to be performed with a scan of the patients physiology as a reference.
Shh.
Hence, discrepancies between what the scientists see in biological experiments and what they see in the simulations allows them to test the models. If there is a mismatch it suggests the model is incorrect and needs to be refined.
Wow, that kinda sounds like.. umm, what's the word I'm after here, umm, science, yes, that's it.
How we know is more important than what we know.
That article pretty much sucks for communicating anything that the scientist is doing. I won't remedy that, but I'll say this: I audited a biophysics class two semesters ago, and the astounding complications of what goes on in cells was a real eye-opener. Of course, I'd learned about chemical pathways, and mitochondria, etc., before, but the class showed how damned complicated and *fast* everything is at the cellular scale.
The professor used this analogy: think of filling a football/soccer (your choice) stadium with ping-pong balls, and paint just two of those balls orange. Then hire some bulldozers to push the balls around randomly and continuously for several decades. How often will the orange balls collide with each other? Once a week? Once a month? Once a year? Maybe only once in a decade? Now envision the stadium scaled down to the size of a cell, with the ping-pong balls now being your average-sized molecule important for some process (chunks of amino acids, say). These will be moving around randomly due to Brownian motion, chemical gradients, etc. How often will two given molecules interact? Probably several times per second. THAT's how amazingly extreme cellular processes are.
It's that sort of analogy (sorry it wasn't about cars, but we could probably work those in somehow) that the article should have had. This stuff is complicated, and requires VERY efficient computation. Kudos to the researchers, and pfft! to the author of the article.