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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.
The scientific community is already working on it, as you might well imagine. Take a look here for a list of published databases of protein interactions and metabolic pathways. The drug companies are throwing money at developing systems that can use this sort of data to (for example) predict negative drug interactions well before a new drug gets anywhere near clinical trials. They're also being used to better understand exactly how existing drugs work, trying to isolate causes of desired effects from those of side effects. This is an emerging field, applying well studied (in computer science) principles of graph theory to biological networks that are only now being mapped.
-JMP
Wow, figures. I actually used TFA for my Cambridge application -- nice to see it appearing on /. albeit slightly later than I expected. Really though, Cambridges Computer Science Lab (funded by our friend Bill Gates, among others) is doing some amazing things. Check out their website at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/.
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