[ExI] holy grail, batman! computer sim of a cell

spike spike66 at att.net
Wed Oct 27 05:36:22 UTC 2010


Hey, cool.  A local researcher claims he has a software simulation of a
cell.  He is giving a free lecture on it Thursday afternoon in Palo Alto.
If anyone is in the hood and wants to meet up there, we can go make a
sooooooshi run afterwards, brutally devour the raw beasts to the brink of
extinction.  Here's the write-up:
 
The target of our research is a fundamental milestone in biology: to build a
computational model that can simulate a complete life cycle of a single
cell, taking into account all genes. We will describe our recent efforts to
build a model which can track all biological processes, including for
example DNA replication, RNA transcription and regulation, protein
synthesis, metabolism and cell division, in the smallest known free-living
organism, Mycoplasma genitalium. We will demonstrate that this whole-cell
model can be used to determine the effect of genomic and environmental
perturbations on cell behavior, and therefore to pursue critically important
questions which have never been addressed before. We are currently creating
a web-based platform which will be open-access and open-source, in order to
enable these tools and methods to be broadly applied.
 
And here's his street cred:
 
Dr. Covert is an Assistant Professor of Bioengineering at Stanford
University. He has a Ph.D., Bioengineering with specialization in
Bioinformatics, from the University of California, San Diego (2003) and a
B.S., Chemical Engineering, Brigham Young University (1997). In 2004-2006,
Dr. Covert held a Postdoctoral Fellowship with the Damon Runyon Cancer
Research Foundation, and in 2003 was First Graduate of the Bioinformatics
Program, University of California, San Diego. In 1991 - 1997 he had the Ezra
Taft Benson Presidential Scholarship at Brigham Young University.
 
So this Mormon guy with the secretive sounding name will see if he can
convince us he has found the holy grail of computational biology.  I sure
hope he has done it.  If so, we can write sims that work on other cells, and
then can create networks to simulate multicelled beasts, then, given enough
computing power, perhaps provided by harnessing the idle processor cycles
that YOU are so egregiously WASTING right now, we can eventually simulate
evolution, which would sim us from protobonobos to humans and right on past
the present day, and lead eventually to a singularity.
 
spike
 
 
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