q-bio 2007: a watershed moment in modern biology

Mol Syst Biol. 3: 148 The mean is often nearer to one extreme than the other, or seems nearer because of our natural tendencies .Aristotle, Ethics Cells continually use information from external signals to sense and respond to environmental changes. One of the key questions facing biology is how can we better understand the systems of cellular regulation underlying this behavior? Can cellular responses in complex environments be predicted? How are the response mechanisms tuned when a cell adapts to environmental changes? Are a cell's sensory mechanisms—in Aristototelian terms, its natural tendencies for perception—well‐matched to its information processing tasks? Recently, researchers gathered in Santa Fe, New Mexico and addressed these questions quantitatively. In opening comments, David H Sharp (Chief Scientist, Los Alamos National Laboratory) dedicated The First q‐bio Conference on Cellular Information Processing to green fluorescent protein (GFP)—a tool that has paved the way for numerous advances in quantitative biology. In subsequent days, participants were treated to one example after another of cellular phenomena characterized using fluorescent probes, including GFP, its variants, and quantum dots. Single‐cell assays of fluorescently labeled proteins, in many cases, were an essential research tool, facilitated by commercially available microscopes with advanced optics and digital image capture. In some cases, the techniques were refined to image subcellular spatial dynamics of single fluorescently labeled proteins. Of note was the increasing use of microfluidic devices, which are providing an unprecedented degree of control over the cellular environment, …