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Modeling the Building Blocks of Life
eldavojohn writes "A new research paper is creating some buzz about the roles of computer engineering in biology. Historically, computational techniques in genome sequencing have proved useful in predicting which DNA sequence produces which amino acid and which amino acid sequence produces which protein. Now, this new research is leading towards a robust model of proteins and their messaging systems. This is one step further in understanding the basics of life and, consequently, pushes us closer to being able to emulate organisms entirely from the bottom up instead of our failed prior approaches of from the top down. A long way from perfect, but an opening into a wide field of study and maybe even a new division of biology."
This may be a bit picky, but the work being done here is not computer engineering but rather computer science. Computer engineering generally refers to engineering techniques for building computers and computer systems (including parts of electrical engineering, materials science, algorithms, etc.) whereas computer science is the study of algorithms. This work is not designing computing systems but rather using algorithms to model the building blocks of biology.
http://yetanotherpoliticalrant.blogspot.com
you think so? How many animals are really studied do you think? I can give you the answer: C. elegans, fruitfly, zebrafish, bulfrog, chicken, mice and rats. The rest hardly counts. The reason why they choose C. elegans in this case you already stated, the principles of signal transduction apply just as much to human beings as to those worms. Your EGFR/RAS/MAPK pathway isn't that different...
While this project might be interesting to some, this is hardly a new approach to biology.
/. summary, but it does not really give the reader a good idea of the current state of the HUGE field of computational biology!
Computational Biology has been around for quite a while now and simulation is actually one of its strongest points so far.
There used to only be two main settings for conducting experiments: in vitro (outside of living organisms, literally within a glass) and in vivo (done in living tissue/organisms).
With the advent of comp. bio., a new and comparatively incredibly inexpensive way of experimenting has become available: in silico (experiments are simulated) This is pretty much what the article was talking about and has been a massive success in biology, for quite some time now!
Since this term has been used since the 1990s, this is not exactly new.
I won't even go into talking about the misleading