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Modelling Life

April 01, 2005

The Biochemist April 2005 issue: systems biology and mathematical modelling

There is a growing agreement that systems biology is important, and an explosive growth of papers with it as a keyword. Yet there are almost as many definitions of systems biology as there are practitioners. Generally, it is accepted as the modelling of biological systems from the bottom up. This issue looks at how it is done.

Also in this issue: we ask science spokesmen to set out their policies. Who deserves your vote?

The Biochemist now available online at http://www.biochemist.org

Models and reality - the role of computational biology

By Denis Noble (University of Oxford, UK)

The last half of the 20th century saw the phenomenal success of the reductionist approach to biology. The structures of numerous macromolecules were unravelled, the chemical nature of DNA was discovered, and the genome sequences of a number of organisms were largely or completely determined. But this very success has created a difficult challenge for the 21st century: what does all this data mean? Could we imagine that with this information and limitless computing power we could simulate the complete functioning of an organism in an exhaustive bottom-up fashion?

Enzymes in context

By Athel Cornish-Bowden (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Marseilles, France) and Jan-Hendrik S. Hofmeyr (University of Stellenbosch, South Africa)

The kinetic behaviour of enzymes is typically observed in conditions appropriate for studying questions of mechanism of action, but these are not necessarily the most appropriate for studying their physiological roles, because they are often too far from those that exist in the living organism. Enzymes therefore need to be studied with natural substrates in the presence of all of the other small molecules likely to affect the activity in vivo, including the reaction products, so that the reverse reaction is not artificially prohibited.

Design - optimize - synthesize

By Richard Gray (Syrris Ltd)

A new way of approaching drug discovery.

Science and Society

Who deserves your vote?

We ask science spokesmen to set out their stalls

Interview:

Professor Mark Walport, Director, The Wellcome Trust

"Funding excellence it is the key to almost everything. There is always a tension between directed research aimed at solving a specific problem and simply encouraging people to do the best science. The Trust has traditionally taken the role of identifying the smartest people that have the best questions to ask. We then just let them get on with it."

OTHER ARTICLES:

Letter from Hungary

Obituaries - Peter Nelson Campbell (1921-2005)

Yasutomi Nishizuka (1932-2004)

Jean-Marie Ghuysen (1925-2004)

BioMed Central Limited

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