E. Coli Whole Cell Model by Covert Lab

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E. Coli Whole Cell Model by Covert Lab by Ciro Santilli 34 Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
github.com/CovertLab/WholeCellEcoliRelease is a whole cell simulation model created by Covert Lab and other collaborators.
The project is written in Python, hurray! But according to te README, it seems to be the use a code drop model with on-request access to master, very meh, asked rationale on GitHub discussion, and they confirmed as expected that it is to:
  • to prevent their publication ideas from being stolen. Who would steal publication ideas with public proof in an issue tracker without crediting original authors?
  • to prevent noise from non collaborators. They do only get like 2 issues as year though, people forget that it is legal to ignore other people :-)
Oh well.
The project is a followup to the earlier M. genitalium whole cell model by Covert lab which modelled Mycoplasma genitalium. E. Coli has 8x more genes (500 vs 4k), but it the undisputed bacterial model organism and as such has been studied much more thoroughly. It also reproduces faster than Mycoplasma (20 minutes vs a few hours), which is a huge advantages for validation/exploratory experiments.
The project has a partial dependency on the proprietary optimization software CPLEX which is freeware, for students, not sure what it is used for exactly, from the comment in the requirements.txt the dependency is only partial.
This project makes Ciro Santilli think of the E. Coli as an optimization problem. Given such external nutrient/temperature condition, which DNA sequence makes the cell grow the fastest? Balancing metabolites feels like designing a Factorio speedrun.
There is one major thing missing thing in the current model: promoters/transcription factor interactions are not modelled due to lack/low quality of experimental data: github.com/CovertLab/WholeCellEcoliRelease/issues/21. They just have a magic direct "transcription factor to gene" relationship, encoded at reconstruction/ecoli/flat/foldChanges.tsv in terms of type "if this is present, such protein is expressed 10x more". Transcription units are not implemented at all it appears.
Everything in this section refers to version 7e4cc9e57de76752df0f4e32eca95fb653ea64e4, the code drop from November 2020, and was tested on Ubuntu 21.04 with a docker install of docker.pkg.github.com/covertlab/wholecellecolirelease/wcm-full with image id 502c3e604265, unless otherwise noted.
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