Abstract
The field of computational cell biology has emerged within the past
5 years because of the need to apply disciplined computational approaches
to build and test complex hypotheses on the interacting structural,
physical, and chemical features that underlie intracellular processes.
To meet this need, newly developed software tools allow cell biologists
and biophysicists to build models and generate simulations from them.
The construction of general-purpose computational approaches is especially
challenging if the spatial complexity of cellular systems is to be
explicitly treated. This review surveys some of the existing efforts
in this field with special emphasis on a system being developed in
the authors' laboratory, Virtual Cell. The theories behind both stochastic
and deterministic simulations are discussed. Examples of respective
applications to cell biological problems in RNA trafficking and neuronal
calcium dynamics are provided to illustrate these ideas.
- 11988477
- animals,
- biophysics,
- computer
- computers,
- cytological
- diffusion,
- factors,
- gov't,
- humans,
- kinetics,
- p.h.s.,
- research
- rna,
- simulation,
- support,
- techniques,
- time
- u.s.
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