The cell is a biochemical factory of immense complexity. As fundamental units of life, cells harvest energy from the environment and use it to synthesize complex molecular machinery, to build replicas of themselves and to move. This is a 4-billion-year-old trick that even today mystifies biologists who struggle to understand the processes and principles at work.
To change this, life scientists have modeled cells at various levels of detail. These models can simulate some important biomolecular processes in the synthesis of proteins, such as transcription and translation. The most advanced models can even predict some of the large-scale characteristics of a bacterial cell, its phenotype, given the organism’s genetic code.
