Hands up who's managed to plough through a research paper on mathematical modelling. No? Then you are probably an experimentalist... But, web sites might be more accessible when it comes to mathematical models.
The Budding Yeast Cell Cycle web site presents a mathematical model of cell-cycle control in budding yeast and is an enhancement of a recent research paper by the groups of John Tyson, Bela Novak and Frederick Cross.
The 'Overview' section presents a complete wiring diagram for the regulation of cell-cycle progression based on published data. The diagram is clickable, allowing the user to review the literature sources.
The regulatory network has been formulated into a set of differential equations (see 'Mathematical model' section) and analysed by computer simulation. The researchers compared the physiology of wild-type cells and >100 mutant strains with the simulated results that were derived from the wiring diagram. The simulation successfully predicted the mutant phenotype in most cases, but some inconsistencies were found (see 'Problems').
The 'Conclusions' section under 'Overview' takes you to the 'Simulate the model' page, which allows users to change the value of any parameter and re-compute the behaviour of the model. There is a short description of each parameter, its default value and the range that allows a viable cell-cycle simulation.
The web site has just been updated and is now even more user-friendly. Browsing the site should give experimentalists a feel for the potential of mathematical modelling and how its predictive power can be useful to design new experiments.
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Heinrichs, A. Wired for cycling. Nat Rev Mol Cell Biol 5, 597 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrm1463
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nrm1463
