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The practical problems of post-genomic biology

Nature Biotechnology volume 18, pages 471–472 (2000)Cite this article

In his visionary commentary, Glen Evans1 describes the emergence of new post-genomic disciplines like proteomics, epigenomics, and phenomics. He proposes that integrated “omic” databases in the future will allow the in silico re-enacting of the entire organism once the totality of the information at the various levels, from genome to proteome and functions, is available. This is an attractive idea: just think of virtual organisms that could serve for virtual clinical trials. However, the “omic” strategy is based on the same linear, monocausal, deterministic thinking that has reigned in molecular biology over the past decades2; it just extrapolates it to the entire genome. This is brute-force, genocentric reductionism in the guise of entireness, rather than a novel integrative approach devoted to wholeness, or as Nature Biotechnology put it in an editorial: “Complicated is not complex.”3

In fact, the present efforts in the drug development industry to simulate organismal function still ignore the very elementary parts, and instead employ the traditional “top-down” modeling approach of physiologists and systems engineers, in which organs and cells are black boxes. Such approaches vastly dominated a recent workshop on computer modeling in biology, despite the promising conference title: “From gene to organ.”Footnote 1 With their dream of simulating organisms “from bottom-up,” genomics scientists touch upon the old riddle of genome-to-phenome mapping. They will have to overcome the mentality of data collecting, clustering, and classification, and develop a qualitatively new conceptual understanding of the complexity of living organisms. Help in tackling this daunting task is already on its way: not only are physical scientists increasingly interested in studying complex systems in general, but one of the first institutions devoted to such studies, the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI) in Boston, MA, has launched collaborations with molecular biologists to harness the data flood triggered by the success of genomic technology.

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Notes

  1. *“From Gene to Organ,” February 23–27, 2000, Georgia Institute of Technology, Hilton Head, SC.

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  1. research fellow at the department of surgery Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, 02115, MA

    Sui Huang

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Huang, S. The practical problems of post-genomic biology. Nat Biotechnol 18, 471–472 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1038/75235

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