What attempts are there at building physical models of biological systems?

[CoffeeWLemon]

TL;DR

As title says: what attempts at building physical models of biological systems there are? Under physical model i mean attempts at describing various biological systems (for example: neurons working, some inner cell mechanist and etc) using math and physics laws. Not really important as how successful/unsuccessful or specific they are.

Hello.

I tried to give quick summery of this post in tl;dr, so here i will explain more in detail what i meaned. Also i will ask to excuse me in advince, cause i have a bad habit of expleinign something longer than it should be even after rereading and editing hull text few times and i cant really call my english good.

Quick summary on why i asking this question: i took interested in biology some time ago and where researching it in my free time. As result i come to "conclusions":

A) Living organisms, even just a cell, are extremely complex systems, to the point that we know a little how exactly they works;

B) Most biological researches, putting it simply, less "we make some mathematical model, we test this model and, if it working, we got some explanetion to procces and we can use it later" and more "we have previus experemental data, from which we can make some guesses, test it and, if we lucky, use its results". In other words, it more about result and less about understending proccess in details (which, taking i naccount complexity of researchable subjects and our interesting in using said result in medicine sooner than later, is understandable).

If take some specific example: i took some interest Yamaka researches on iPS (i interested more in inner cell workings and started to look in biology in the first case cause of that), and as i understand, it basicly (not to downplay this work or efforts, it extremly interesting data and a lot of work, with varius experements from different groups going as far as to 50s) can be sumed up as "we have pull of factors, which might have some influense on cell been in pluripotent state, so we used method of elimination to find those who really affect it", but not how exectly those factors force cell back into pluripotent state.

After having chat on this subject with people from biophysics department at university in which i studying (said department take interest in neurons working and protein binding in context of cancer), i sort of got confermation of what i got so far and came to idea that all current phycisal models of biological systems are "raw" at best. Still, i would love to get second opinion on that if possible (or even just chat on this subject), hence why i typing this.

Also, speaking a little more on what i mean under "physical models of biological systems", i guess something like perceptron model would be good example. As far as im aware (sadly i didnt have a lot time lately so extremly superficially) nowadays it used in building AI neural networks, but at first it was proposed as attempt at describing though proccess in brain. It didnt worked well as intended beside some specific cases (cause didnt coutn nonliner working of neurons, used sort of binar logic with analogy on computers and etc, if i got it right). Still, it look like interesting attempt at describing process in biological system, even with some practical use (even if not directly biological).

Just to clarify: i more interested on "what attempts" there are/were (rather than their successfulness or specificity) to get sort of idea of what we have and what we tried to use.

It would help a lot, if anyone will be able to help or even point in some dirrection, so thanks in advense.

Have a nice day everyone)

p. s. Also just to say: this post not really 100% biology, but, as far as i understand, this thread looked most suitable to post it. If it wrong place i wll repost somewhere also, sorry for inconvenience.

 

[BillTre]

First, this is the right place for this post. In my view it is 100% biology. Biology is imperialistic to other domains of thought. It goes in takes concepts and uses a lot of them for its own purposes.

Second, it would be a good idea if you would post more detail about where you got your ideas from and what kinds of applications you are interested in. Your post confused me in places and I don't really understand where you are coming from concept-wise.

There are plenty of physical models for things, especially in the past, like behavioral models of competing behavioral outputs from animal that has a choice of doing one of several different behaviors. Fight or flight, or sex and reproduction.

For modern biology as I see it, the best thing to do is build a model in your head about what is going on (for example in a cell) based on realistic ideas from research about what is known. That would be the physical model I would use for understanding a biological process. Physical models are a kind of crude way to get an idea of what you want to understand and to then build your own internal (inside your head) model for further use. The real world is always going to be much more complex.

Biophysics (which you mentioned) is full of mathematical or physical models of biological things. There are lots of similarities among flow bases processes like water flow through pipes and blood flow through blood vessels. The biological parts are much more complicated that simple plumbing however. Similarly the passage of molecules through reaction networks is somewhat like a flowing water system. I have seen passive flow of change down neuron dendrites compared to water flow in how it decreases as come of it goes out different branches.

If you have not already, you might want to take a biology course or look over a textbook. There are so many areas of biology it is hard to predict what you would want to become more informed about.
Also chemistry is important for biology. Its good to know some of that, like organic chemistry and biochemistry, but these are details.
Most biological things are highly interconnected. In addition, for each particular part in a cell, there probably many similar parts (except for the genes) doing similar things in slightly different settings in the cell. This allows them to all act different in response to something, making things even more complex

The complexity of biology is probably the main thing that sets biology apart from physics and chemistry.