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CATALOGUING EVERYTHING IN THE CELL
To many, one of the boldest examples so far of the new biology has been the human genome project. Gene Myers, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, was at the forefront of that effort. Five years ago, when Myers was vice president of informatics research at Celera Genomics, his radical computing method for assembling DNA sequences catapulted the company to the front of the high-stakes race to read the three-billion-letter human genome sequence. Ultimately, Celera and its competitor—a government-sponsored consortium—joined forces and completed the genome sequence years ahead of schedule.

Now Myers has set even loftier goals: “Having produced the sequence of the genome, we’d like to understand what it actually says.” Like the University of Washington’s mathematician/geneticist Philip Green (see main article), he wants to know how the genome is regulated and how all of the molecules in cells interact. That’s going to take a lot of data crunching. “You’re dealing with a system that’s so large that the unaided human mind isn’t going to see it,” says Myers. “We’re going to need the kind of help that computers are good at.”

Consider his own efforts to use microscopes to track the moment-by-moment whereabouts of the hundred-or-so most important transcription factors (the proteins that turn networks of genes on and off) in the developing embryos of model organisms such as fruit flies or nematodes. “I want to see gene expression at the level of what’s happening in each cell,” says Myers. But he maintains that “at some point, our eyes aren’t going to be able to look at all the images. We will be producing visual data at rates that require computation and interpretation by computers.”

High-tech hardware alone won’t be enough, however. Myers thinks that biologists have to do a better job of incorporating knowledge and approaches from other disciplines into their research. For example, “We’re going to have to start thinking about the mathematical properties of these living systems from an industrial-engineering point of view—in terms of systems with feedbacks, failure modes, and redundancy.”

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