What is the promise of bioinformatics?
The completion of the human genome project itself is a marvelous milestone, and it’s the starting gate for what will become the outstanding problem for the next 15 to 20 years in biology–the postgenomic era that will require lots of bioinformatics. It has to do with how do we understand the integrated behavior of 100,000 genes, turning one another on and off in cells and between cells, plus the cell signaling networks within and between cells. We are confronting for the first time the problem of integrating our knowledge. SA: How so? The fertilized egg has somewhere between 80,000 and 100,000 structural genes. I guess we’ll know pretty quickly what the actual answer is. We’re entitled to think of the, let’s say, 100,000 genes in a cell as some kind of parallel processing chemical computer in which genes are continuously turning one another on and off in some vastly complex network of interaction. Cell signaling pathways are linked to genetic regulatory pathways in ways we’re just begi
