Mesoscopic kinetics and its applications in protein synthesis

Abstract

Molecular biology emerged through unification of genetics and nucleic acid chemistry that took place with the discovery of the double helix (Watson and Crick 1953). Accordingly, molecular biology could be defined as the sum of all techniques used to perform genetic experiments by manipulating DNA. One consequence of the development of these techniques is large-scale sequencing of genomes from an ever increasing number of organisms. However, it became clear from this development that genetic information per se is not enough to grasp the most interesting functional and evolutionary aspects of cells and multi-cellular organisms. In fact, understanding how genotype leads to phenotype depends on concepts and techniques from areas that so far have been largely alien to molecular biological research, like physics, mathematics, and engineering. From the bits and pieces from these and other scientific fields new tools must be generated to make possible an understanding of the dynamic, adapting, and developing living systems that somehow take shape from the instructions given by their genomes. The growing total of these tools and their integration in experimental and theoretical approaches to understand complex biological processes in ways previously out of reach could be a way to define systems biology, in analogy with the above definition of molecular biology.