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."

Comments

Hmmm....

[Otter]

C. elegans has a completely predictable sequence of cell division, which is one of the main reasons (along with transparency, self-fertilization, survival in a freezer and some others) why it's so heavily studied.

This is a really nice piece of work, but they picked some really low-hanging fruit to try out their method. Which is one of the hallmarks of really nice work, of course.

Nothing special...

[voislav98]

If you read the actual article, it's nothing special. They took what's known from extensive lab studies of this organism and made a computer model out of it. It's not really able to predict how the organism would behave under some unknown conditions, but it has some mechanism biult in that would, kind of, wink, wink, give it that capability. What is the most telling is that they hadn't been able to predict the behaviour of one of their cell lines (lin-15(lf) mutants), so it just shows how limited the model is. The annoying thing is that the press article is barely readable from all the buzz words and other crap, sounding like it's some sort of breakthrough, when it's just run-of-the-mill stuff done in probably a dozen other places.