What is it about?
We cover examples of mathematical models of marine microbial communities highlighting the successful integration of experimental and theoretical/computational approaches.
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Why is it important?
Biologists are still often skeptical about theoretical models, and mostly consider only bioinformatics as a useful computational approach. We wrote a review intended to be appealing both to experimentalists (by avoiding technical mathematical details and offering a general view of the most widely used methods) and to theoreticians (by covering interesting applications to biological systems and referring to more specific and technical reviews).
Perspectives
It is today necessary to bring biology from a qualitative to a quantitative science. To do so, we need more biologists to engage at the earliest stages of a project with theoreticians. Data are indeed expensive (in terms of time and resources) to generate, but are often not usable for modeling because of design issues. With theoretical models of the fundamental mechanisms behind a certain phenotype, it will be possible to gain control and predictive power over many interesting biological systems.
Dr Antonella Succurro
Universitat zu Koln
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: A Diverse Community To Study Communities: Integration of Experiments and Mathematical Models To Study Microbial Consortia, Journal of Bacteriology, May 2017, ASM Journals,
DOI: 10.1128/jb.00865-16.
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