|
Flops. Cells balance right on the edge of Maxwell's Demon. Even a few thousand ions can change behavior radically. So, you are forced to track all the ions, proteins, lipids, etc. Which means you have to do a lot of atom-by-atom tracking. There are a few tricks here, but since the cell is not crystalline, you can't do a lot of fun physicsy math to get the problem to be easier. Also, most of the time, since this is 'research' to begin with, you don't know what's in the cell. That's the point of looking. We've nearly no idea what all the proteins are in any given cell. DNA gives some guide, but a stochastic switch from coding to non-coding happens, constantly. So you don't know what all the proteins in a cell are, where they are, what they do, what they don't do, what the extracellular space is like, etc. Cells are just really complicated. So you need a lot of flops. |
Re: flops. I understand brute force is a good way to simulate dynamics but we constantly solve hard problems by approximation and have gotten pretty far with that approach. So what approximations have been tried and why have they been considered failures?
Also https://mobile.twitter.com/SteveStuWill/status/1268111230020...: > "Scientists created fully functional mini-livers out of human skin cells, then successfully transplanted them into rats. The research is a proof-of-concept for potentially revolutionary technology and provides a glimpse of an organ donor-free future." Wow!
That's unrelated to the original points but I see plenty of innovative approaches to problems in biology. Simulating cells is just one way to figure them out and we don't need to figure them out completely through computational means to put them to good uses. Biology is already computronium and if we can understand how to "program" then we don't need to simulate everything.