Life in silico: Are we close yet?
Abstract
In his 1944 book What is Life? (1), Erwin Schrödinger asked, “How can the events in space and time which take place within the spatial boundary of a living organism be accounted by physics and chemistry?” In nearly 80 y that have followed, we have learned a great deal about the physical mechanisms of subcellular phenomena, yet a first-principles computer simulation of a living cell in action remains an elusive goal. In a recent article (2), Netz and Eaton predict how long we will have to wait before such a simulation becomes a reality. They further extend their estimate to larger biological systems and discuss whether and when it will be possible to simulate multicellular entities such as the human brain. Simulating a molecular assembly as large as a cell over a biologically meaningful time interval of, say, an hour (comparable to the cell division time) seems like a daunting task. Indeed, one of the triumphs of the modern field of molecular simulations is the observation of reversible folding of small proteins (3), which occurs at a microsecond timescale. A single cell, in contrast, can synthesize thousands or millions of proteins per hour, many of which may take seconds or minutes to fold, and only with additional help from the cellular machinery. In a recent computational tour de force (4), a relatively large, 100 nm × 100 nm × 100 nm subvolume of a cell’s cytoplasm was simulated. The timescale of tens of nanoseconds attained in that study was, however, woefully short,…
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