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. 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. “You don’t really understand how something
works until you can reproduce it yourself,” says graduate
student and team member Jayodita Sanghvi. Now that an entire
organism has been simulated, researchers believe that Bi