4 ms·
(former bioinformatician here) I agree, the totality of the interactions for a single cell is so many orders of magnitude above what we are capable of currentl
by jboggan 15y ago
(former bioinformatician here)
I agree, the totality of the interactions for a single cell is so many orders of magnitude above what we are capable of currently modeling that I fear these computational approaches are dangerously over-hyped. Having been privy to the state-of-the-art projects in a lab with a ~5,000 node cluster it was still disappointing to see how rough the whole cell modeling approaches were. It's really tough just to model a small corner of the cytoplasm and get the diffusion of different protein and metabolites right, let alone address organelles or chromosomal folding and surface availability. It's a mess.
- xaa 15y agoOver-hyped? In my neck of the woods these approaches are treated with extreme skepticism for just the reasons you mention. For instance: De novo protein folding is not a solved problem, so how can a simulation predict dynamics for a protein whose conformation isn't even known? I'm sure in the year 2150 when my grandchildren go to the doctor to be scanned by the tricorder, the results will go to the full-cell (and full-body) simulator...but for now, I think bioinformatics is better served by sticking to higher levels of abstraction like transcript and protein counts (for disease modeling purposes).