Computational cell biology: past, present and future

As in physics and chemistry long ago, molecular life sciences are undergoing a foundational revision from empirical to mathematical. This trend has been prompted by insufficiency of the reductionist approach to provide quantitative explanations and predictions for the properties of molecular regulatory systems, whose observed behaviours are typically emergent phenomena governed by interactions between multiple components. A now classical example of this situation is the study of biological oscillations, such as circadian rhythms [1–3] and the cell cycle [4–6], where the most significant properties of oscillation (period, amplitude, robustness, etc.) are non-trivially related in general to the details of the underlying network.