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This is revolutionary to say the least and very, very interesting. This is a big step along a path that could either be very beneficial to human life OR.. it could get snapped up and used for weapons research.. lets hope the latter doesn't happen.
Scientists at Stanford University and the J. Craig Venter Institute — remember the Human Genome project — have simulated an entire organism in software for the first time ever.
Using a 128-node computing cluster, a team of scientists led by Stanford professor Markus Covert incorporated data from more than 900 scientific papers and 1,900 experiments to simulate every molecular interaction and the effects of all 525 genes of the smallest known free-living bacterium: the parasite Mycoplasma genitalium.
And, yes, that bacteria lives right where its name suggests.
Imagine the implications of this if we managed to map the entire human body or even just an organ. The health benefits for this are potentially enormous!
Simulating a single cell division takes about 10 hours, according to Covert, and generates half a gigabyte of data. Not exactly big data, but then it is a very small organism. Adding more computing power should shorten the simulation time.
But the reason for building a bacterium in emulation?
“You don’t really understand how something works until you can reproduce it yourself,” says graduate student and team member Jayodita Sanghvi.
“If you use a model to guide your experiments, you’re going to discover things faster. We’ve shown that time and time again,” said team leader Covert.
But don’t get your hopes up too high for personalized medicine or helpful simulations of how medication will affect you before you actually have to take it. A fully simulated human being is still a long way off.
Originally posted by roguetechie
THis is a tremendous leap in computing.... Once we can simulate life we can really get cracking on big problems like disease and dare I say it death.....
Hopefully we hear about even larger organisms being produced every month from here on out.
Originally posted by roguetechie
THis is a tremendous leap in computing.... Once we can simulate life we can really get cracking on big problems like disease and dare I say it death.....
Hopefully we hear about even larger organisms being produced every month from here on out.