(210b) Towards a Whole-Cell Model of Mycoplasma Genitalium

The target of our research is a fundamental milestone in biology: to build a computational model that can simulate a complete life cycle of a single cell, taking into account all genes. We will describe our recent efforts to build a model which can track all biological processes, including for example DNA replication, RNA transcription and regulation, protein synthesis, metabolism and cell division, in the smallest known free-living organism, Mycoplasma genitalium. We will demonstrate that this whole-cell model can be used to determine the effect of genomic and environmental perturbations on cell behavior, and therefore to pursue critically important questions which have never been addressed before. We are currently creating a web-based platform which will be open-access and open-source, in order to enable these tools and methods to be broadly applied.