LifeExplorer

Molecular Biology is a booming science with enormous scope and potential. In many ways its current status can be compared with the early days of the computer industry: it has the capacity to change fundamentally the way we approach certain key technologies, such as medicine and manufacturing.

Molecular Biology has now reached a stage where new tools need to be developed in order to deal with the vast amount of data which is available and with the inherent complexity of living organisms. Therefore, repositories, models and simulation tools are necessary.

A first step towards discovery tools specific for life sciences is to represent in 3D all the components of a living system. Such a 3D visualization tool enables to map cell components and navigate within the cell at various scales from a complete cell down to a single macromolecule at atomic detail.

The Foundation proposes to build a first prototype to map molecular components of a bacterial cell E. coli. It deals with the representation of a volume (representing a part of the cell volume) and the integration of 3D reconstructions of biomolecules from various databases. One can navigate in this volume in all directions at two different observation scales.

They are several IT challenges to be solved:

• 3D reconstruction from heterogeneous data sources at different scales,

• Navigation within a crowded space

• Set up of an underlying database of biological components

Based on this first step, a future computer modelisation could be built in order to take into account the contribution of each macro molecules, the cell compartimentation as well as mecanical aspects.