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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."
So will this someday allow me to take parts from various trees and make a whole new species of tree? I think I'll call it "Frankenpine..."
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.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
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
Heck, if we could create a self propegating virus with a near-nil chance of mutation, that could specifically target and destroy another virus (ie: aids killing virus), we could wipe out entire strains of it. And if the facilities could model it at the most basic levels, the computer could simulate purposefull mutations (disable the self-kill genes) and try to find a combination that works against the next kind of mutation.
Also very usefull for producing hard-to-make chemicals, as we could create custom-made bacteria that churn out the protein sequence we want. We already do this in a lot of cases, but making the base bacteria is very difficult, and a steamlined method to make different kinds of chemicals could be a huge help for everyone involved.
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.
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