Introduction to Virtual Cell and its Possible Application to Toxicity

A variety of biological theories and facts have been integrated into computer software and databases. This has made it possible for computer scientists, mathematicians, and physicists to collaborate with biologists to build a well-known tool of system biology called the virtual cell (VCell) (1). Data on cellular biochemistry and cell structure have been merged into this system to explain how cells produce complex physiological and metabolic processes. Because a cell behaves like a highly complex factory that organizes thousands of different molecules to produce a specialized function, the VCell must implement cellular biological functions with proper parameters and models. In this sense, the VCell is a computational framework with tools for describing, predicting, and understanding intricate cellular biological systems through modeling and simulations. This tool is also very useful for guiding experimental design, because model simulation can be costeffectively repeated under many different sets of conditions.