The Virtual Cell Studio, a Sophisticated Feature to Attack the Vision of Virtual Organism

摘要

One of the most exciting challenges of modern bioinformatics is to find answers to the crucial questions of how to combine static and dynamic arrangements of molecules and their interactions in order to gain insights into the functions of the individual system parts and to learn how the individual units interact with each other to establish the whole organism. In order to approach system-level analysis the relational platform PheGe has been generated. PheGe provides static and dynamic views on the establishment and maintenance of functional units of an organism and targets the construction of a virtual organism by linking intricate systems of cellular communication to an overall response. Hereby, an implemented virtual cell studio serves as a building block for the establishment of a virtual organism where regulatory, metabolic and neuronal circuits can be analyzed and artificially induced knockouts or malfunctions can be simulated on a cellular and systemic level.