Mycoplasma genitalium, a bacterium known to cause urethritis, made headlines in 2008 when J. Craig Venter and colleagues announced that they had manufactured and assembled the organism’s 600,000 base pair genome. Now, the microbe is in the news again—this time for becoming the first organism to be fully modeled by a computer program.
Bioengineering professor Markus Covert of Stanford University and colleagues scoured some 1,000 papers in the scientific literature to glean the information needed about the functions of M. genitalium proteins and genes to model how the bacterium behaves in the real world. In the end, they constructed a computer simulation that incorporates every known gene function. The team published its results last week (July 19) in Cell.
"So far, it all works great," Covert told The Chronicle of Higher Education. "We were able to recapitulate a lot of the behaviors of the cell." Running hundreds of simulations, the ...
