using a stored genome could it be possible to simulate any animal without needing to simulate evry atom

Question: using a stored genome could it be possible to simulate any animal without needing to simulate evry atom
- Keywords:
  animal,
  biotechnology,
  genetics
Asked by anon-385220 to Zoe V, Martin M, Alexander dB on 27 Feb 2024.
- Zoe Vance answered on 27 Feb 2024:
  
  Do you mean could we generate an animal from just the genome? Or can we simulate every process going on in the animal?
  
  For the first one, that’s largely what happens in normal development. All animals start off as one cell and information from the genome is the main input to go from single cell > full animal, though there are a few examples of proteins/signals that are needed from the mother to set things up I think. But for us to simulate the process from just an unknown genome would probably be quite difficult, there are entire fields dedicated to working out how genome information plays out for the organism, or working out how all the pathways of development interact. A lot of the time we can use information we know in, for example, human to guide investigations in other species but the systems aren’t identical.
  
  The second question is more difficult again. We know full pathways for a majority of important processes (in humans at least, or other well-studied organisms) and would sometimes know the impact of specific genome changes on those pathways, but there are still some unknowns. If you had a powerful enough computer you might be able to run a simulation of all biological processes in a human but I don’t think it would be identical to an actual human. There’s also always quite a degree of randomness in biological systems so running the same genome twice probably would give different results even if your simulation was completely perfect. And again, if it was just an arbitrary genome you might have trouble because you would know even less, although you could work out certain things if you could identify closely related species with more information known about them.
- Alexander De Bruin answered on 27 Feb 2024:
  
  possible, yes. can we do it today, probably not for anything particularly complex.
- Martin McCoustra answered on 28 Feb 2024:
  
  The genome is simply a code that tells the biological machines how to assemble a particular organism. We can decode that code and have machines that can make the proteins etc. that the code tells us are needed. However, whether we could do it in a way that would re-create the living organism is an interesting question.
  
  But perhaps your question is more along the lines of how much of the organism do I need to simulate to convince people. Scientists have been working of robot cockroaches for years and basically seek to simulate the natural behaviour … walking, seeking food, hiding. Here genome is not so important more how the brain is wired… the so-called neural network. There are some examples of these tiny robots that behave like real cockroaches even if they don’t look like them.