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Research on Construction of Virtual Cells on Cyber Space
Interview video about this project Name of Researcher:
Masaru Tomita
Professor, the Faculty of Environmental Information, and the Graduate School of Media & Governance, Keio University Outline of Research:
Recent years, the comprehensive data on the cell biology is much accumulated. Various databases, such as genomic sequences, gene expressions, protein structures, and metabolic networks, are constructed and are available on the cyber space. We are developing a cell simulation environment to understand the cell as an integrant of the vast data.
Details of the Research:
Complex nature of biological systems arises from diversity of components and underlying rules, rather than emerging complexity from homogeneity and a few principles in physics and chemistry, characterize biology. Software development for non-trivial cell simulation projects is a notably expensive process. For research projects in the traditional computational sciences, where brute force computation remains operative, it is reasonable to develop new software for each project, sometimes in a disposable fashion. Most of the traditional computational science fields like computational physics are characterized by numerous uniform components and a limited number of simple principles. Cell simulation, in contrast, involves numerous and various components with different properties, interacting in diverse, complicated manners. The design and implementation of simulation software inevitably reflects the complexity of the problem. Software engineering can support the cellular simulation projects in many ways including: sophisticated modeling theory, well-designed software platform, data management methods, project management etc. E-Cell SE is our challenge to provide cell simulation / bioinformatics community with a smart software platform.
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