Software Emulates Lifespan of Entire Organism

""You read in the paper just about every week, 'Cancer gene discovered' or 'Alzheimer gene discovered,' " said the leader of the new research, Markus W. Covert, an assistant professor of bioengineering at Stanford. "A lot of the public wonders, 'Why haven't we cured all these things?' The answer, of course, is that cancer is not a one-gene problem; it's a many-thousands-of-factors problem."

For medical researchers and biochemists, simulation software will vastly speed the early stages of screening for new compounds. And for molecular biologists, models that are of sufficient accuracy will yield new understanding of basic cellular principles.

This kind of modeling is already in use to study individual cellular processes like metabolism. But Dr. Covert said: "Where I think our work is different is that we explicitly include all of the genes and every known gene function. There's no one else out there who has been able to include more than a handful of functions or more than, say, one-third of the genes."

The simulation of the complete life cycle of the pathogen, Mycoplasma genitalium, was presented on Friday in the journal Cell. The scientists called it a "first draft" but added that the effort was the first time an entire organism had been modeled in such detail - in this case, all of its 525 genes."

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/21/science/in-a-first-an-entire-organism-is-simulated-by-software.html