Physiome Project

Crampin EJ, Smith NP, Hunter PJ. Multi-scale modelling and the lUPS physiome project. J Mol Histol 2004 35 707-14. 

Hunter PJ, Borg TK. Integration from proteins to organs the Physiome Project. Nat Rev Mol Cell Biol 2003 4 237-43. 

Popel AS, Pries AR, Slaaf DW. Microcirculation Physiome Project. J Vase Res 1999 36 253-5. 

This view lays the basis of probably the most exciting new development in bio-medical research - the Physiome Project. 

The Physiome Project sets a vision that will be much harder to accomplish than that of the Human Genome Project - formally begun in October... 

The Physiome Project should be viewed as both a vision and a route. It has been portrayed as consisting of two parts (Bassingthwaighte et al. 1998) (i) the databasing of biological information (the Mechanic s touch ), and (ii) the development of descriptive and, ultimately, analytical models of biological function (the Orbiter s view ). These are by no means sequential stages of the development. 

The Physiome Project will undoubtedly benefit from lessons learned during the progress of the Genome Project, in particular, that big visions and small steps (at least initially) are not necessarily a contradiction. It will, however, have to develop a completely different approach to problem solving than that used for the Genome Project, as neither the total dimension of the task (there are only 23 human chromosome pairs) nor the size of the smallest component that needs investigating (DNA bases) can be defined at the outset of the Physiome Project. 

So much about the vision - what about the route The Physiome Project will - like the Genome and Visible Human projects - crucially depend on the ability to develop the necessary tools for its own successful implementation. Apart from obtaining useful data and building representative databases, this primarily includes the capacity to devise appropriate algorithms to model physiological function. 

To implement the Physiome Project, a lot of good science (Wolpert) and thinking (Dover) will be required. The tools that will ultimately define the success of the project are analytical models of biological processes that have predictive power - virtual cells, tissues, organs and systems. 

Bassingthwaighte, J. B., 1998, Physiome Project, www.physiome.org (accessed July, 2000). 

Hunter, P., P. Robbins, and D. Noble (2002). The lUPS human physiome project. Pflugers Arch. 445, 1-9. 

Databases A number of databases of membrane models are being constructed. The lUPS Physiome project (Hunter et al, 2002) is an attempt to make mathematical models freely available on the internet although tools to translate the stored models (in XML) into machine executable form are not freely available at the time of this writing. 

Noble D, Gamy A, Noble PJ (2012). How the Hodgkin-Huxley equations inspired the cardiac physiome project. J Physiol 590 2613-2628. 

Hunter, P. J., E. J. Crampin, and P. M. F. Nielsen. 2008. Bioinformatics, multiscale modeling and the lUPS Physiome Project. Brief Bionform 9 333-343. 

D. Nickerson, M. Nash, P. Nielsen, N. Smith, and P. Hunter, Computational multiscale modeling in the lUPS Physiome Project modeUng cardiac electromechanics, IBM Journal of Research and Development, vol. 50, 2010, pp. 617-630. 

Hunter, R, Robbins, P. and Noble, D. 2002. The lUPS human Physiome project. Pflugers Arch, 445,1-9. 

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