Abstract
Although we are successfully consolidating our knowledge of the’ sequence’ and ‘structure’ branches of molecular cell biology in an accessible manner, the mountains of knowledge about the function, activity and interaction of molecular systems in cells remain fragmented. Sequence and structure research use computers and computerized databases to share, compare, criticize and correct scientific knowledge, to reach a consensus quickly and effectively. Why can’t the study of biomolecular systems make a similar computational leap? Both sequence and structure research have adopted good abstractions: ‘DNA-as-string’ (a mathematical string is a finite sequence of symbols) and ‘protein-as-threedimensional- labelled-graph’, respectively. Biomolecular systems research has yet to find a similarly successful one.
Paper reproduced with permission from NATURE - Vol. 419 - 26 September 2002 - p. 343.
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Milner, R. Communicating and Mobile Systems: The Pi-calculus. (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000).
Fontana, W. and Buss, L. W. in Boundaries and Barriers (eds Casti, J. and Karlqvist, A.) 56–116 (Addison-Wesley, New York).
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Regev, A., Shapiro, E. (2003). Cells as Computation. In: Priami, C. (eds) Computational Methods in Systems Biology. CMSB 2003. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2602. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-36481-1_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-36481-1_1
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