Bernhard Palsson
Departments of Bioengineering and Pediatrics University of California, San Diego, San Diego, USA
Following the availability of full genome sequences in the mid 1990s, an effort was initiated to reconstruct, on a genome-scale, the biochemical reaction networks that underlie cellular functions. After 15 years of intense efforts, we now have highly curated network reconstructions, their experimental validation, and the generation of mathematical and modeling procedures available that allow the computation of cellular functions from genome- and bibliome-wide data sets. This effort has put a mechanistic basis into the most fundamental relationship in the life sciences; the genotypephenotype relationship. This effort has started with simple organisms and the best characterized cellular functions and it is steadily growing in scope and biological complexity.