Computational cell biology

All of us who do experiments and think about biology on a daily basis know that biological systems are exceedingly complex. Biologists have long avoided facing up to the interconnected nature of cellular processes by using reductionist approaches. This strategy has been spectacularly successful in identifying key factors for many fundamentally important biological processes. However, the traditional methods of cell and molecular biology are not very well suited to illuminating the big picture of how the manifold cellular events we have discovered are interconnected. As we explore in increasing detail the molecular nature of cells and organisms, it is becoming unavoidably clear that our simple, reductionist models can be incomplete, inaccurate, or entirely incorrect. Pathways are rarely linear, but are usually branched and interconnected; proteins rarely interact with just a few partners, but generally form extensive...