Scientists create software simulation of whole organism
American scientists claim to be able to simulate all functions of an organism with specially developed software. The team claims to be the first to do this. It concerns the bacterial species Mycoplasma genitalium.
The conscious bacteria has a total of 525 genes, most of which functions are known. The scientists, who work at Stanford University and the J. Craig Venter Institute, have modeled all the genetic information with software. Information about proteins that enter into interactions and substances that are produced in the bacterial cell is also stored in the simulation. Based on this, the researchers believe they can provide an accurate representation of the organism.
According to the scientists, the software runs on a cluster of 128 computers. When imitating basic cellular processes such as cell division, the computers have to calculate 10 hours, generating 500MB of data. More computing power would soon be needed to model more complex cases, the researchers say.
Scientists should eventually be able to conduct experiments with the software system without actually having to work with bacterial cultures. For example, it is possible to test the effect of a new drug by feeding the relevant data to the computer network. The system should also provide a better understanding of basic cellular processes.
The researchers claim that they are the first to succeed in simulating an entire organism. However, the specific bacterial species is relatively simple: other bacterial species have thousands of genes, while organisms such as humans and other animals can have tens of thousands of genes.
It’s not the first time scientists have experimented with artificial life. earlier presented Craig Venter, founder of the institute of the same name, already has a bacterial species with an artificial genome: scientists had succeeded in using a bacterium as an empty shell to put their own DNA in it. Incidentally, Venter was also involved in the project that ensured that the first complete sequence of a human genome was unraveled.