发信人: puppeteer (减肥中的河马), 信区: Biology
标 题: Re: 推荐一些比较有意思的细胞的实验室或program吧
发信站: BBS 未名空间站 (Mon Sep 12 20:07:26 2005)

I think the fact is that very few systems in biology are low-dimensional chaos
as far as I know. Typically there are a lot of parameters.

I think in biology, it is really the opposite, we have a high dimensional
system with a lot of unreliable components, it's easy to get randomness. The
challenge is the system is actually very robust and sometimes controlled by a
few parameters because it has to respond to a more or less predictable
environment. This is why I think there is hope in the modeling approach.
Ultimately maybe we will learn to speak the language without knowing all the
detailed parameters. There might be organizing rules which are the design
principles of these systems.

But I still think that in order to generate hypothesis of what those design
principles might look like, we need to have a genomics kind of approach on
some small scale model system first. So my research program still is first
getting some optics based way to stimulate and record from neurons, then
exhaustively crack a small circuit like C elegans or parts of drosophila. Then
in the process we should build up tools to understand how to go from network
connectivity diagrams to the ultimate behavior. We might crack the learning
rules involved too. With the help of those theoretical understandings, we
might finally tackle bigger systems.

I don't think a systems level comprehensive model of the cortex is coming soon
but I am not as pessmistic as overlap. But now there is really a bottleneck
of genomics scale data on the network level.

As to systems biology, the hype of building comprehensive models of cells
might be a bit out of reach right now. But quantiative models of a few key
proteins has certainly shed new light on details of biological mechanisms. I
think there will be a lot to be done there. But all this has to go with
quantitative experiments. It's only natural that after all the key players are
figured out, to study the dynamic interactions between them.






【 在 heculase (似水年华) 的大作中提到: 】
: 贴个学物理的师兄写的东西罢
: 非线性科学与物理学基础
: - 繁星客栈笔谈录 -
: - 卢昌海 -
: 本文是我在繁星客栈上与网友讨论非线性科学， 尤其是其中的那些普适常数， 在
: 物理上是否具有基础意义的帖子。
: 从物理学的角度讲， 构成物理体系出发点的物理学原理及其直接对应的数学表述
: 才是 foundamental 的， 而在此基础上可以用数学推理得到的所有东西都被认为
: 是可以由那些物理原理所解释的， 因而不是 foundamental 的 (换句话说， 物理
: 学上所说的解释本身就包含了数学推理)。 拿非线性理论来说， 按照这种理解，
: ...................



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