UK and Japanese scientists join forces to construct the Virtual Microbe
Wednesday 28 October 2009
Microbes are the most numerous organisms on the planet. They are responsible for disease but are also essential for life. Yet despite the invaluable role they play in our lives we know surprisingly little about how they work. A group of leading UK and Japanese researchers, including Professor Johnjoe McFadden of the University of Surrey, aims to change all that with the construction of the world’s first virtual microbe.
The scientists recently met at a Microbial Systems Biology workshop held in Osaka, Japan. The meeting was sponsored by the UK BBSRC and Japanese JST Research Councils and organised by Professor McFadden and Professor Kazuyuki Shimizu of the Kyushu Institute of Technology. The aim was to identify complementary approaches that could be used to establish synergistic collaborative projects between Japanese and UK researchers.
The meeting was a great success. The synergies and complementarities identified at the meeting suggested that, by integrating their activities, the groups present at the Osaka meeting (and additional systems biology groups in Japan and the UK), should now be able to take on the challenge of constructing realistic models for unicellular micro-organisms. Accordingly, the meeting concluded with the Osaka Declaration that: “A key target for future collaborations in microbial systems biology will be the construction of a generic model of microbial central metabolism and its control: a virtual microbe.”
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