Non-molecular systems biology is aimed at the prediction of the functional features of bio-systems on the basis of known cell proteomes and interactomes. Understanding the interactions between all the involved molecules is therefore the key for gaining a deep understanding of such processes. Albeit many thousands of interactions are known, accurate molecular insights are available for only a small fraction of them. The difficulties found in the resolution of atomic level structures for interacting pairs, make the predictive power of molecular computational biology methods essential for the advancement of the field. Indeed, bridging the gap formed due to the lack of structural details can therefore transform systems biology into models that more accurately reflect biological reality. Proteomes and interactomes, albeit extremely useful for the characterization at a macro level of the functioning of a whole cell, provide a rather abstract network of macromolecules. However, the distance to a real physical picture is very large. Indeed, a more concrete description of the cell networks will arrive when complete interaction pathways will be complemented with all-atom three dimensional structures of protein complexes. This kind of information will confer an extremely important novel role to experimental/computational structural biology in the field of systems biology. Indeed, structural information for interacting cellular components will produce a more and more complete all-atom-detail scaffold for the characterization of entire cellular pathways, which will be of immense benefit to anybody studying or modeling biological systems. [Piccoli S, Giorgetti A (2011) Perspectives on Computational Structural Bio-Systems]
Last date updated on April, 2024
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