Usually people modeling cells don't consider molecular dynamics, they consider concentrations of proteins, ions, and metabolites. A full MD simulation would ob

Usually people modeling cells don't consider molecular dynamics, they consider concentrations of proteins, ions, and metabolites. A full MD simulation would obviously be superior, but useful predictions could be made without it. It's hard to say which is the better approach. On the one hand you have MD from which you could technically build an accurate model "from scratch", folding all of your own proteins as part of the simulation, but it is exceedingly expensive to do that. On the other hand, you have a model built at the level of biochemical reactions and molecular biology, which is computationally feasible, but then you don't have enough information from bench work to flesh it out.