An international collaboration of approximately 100 laboratories was launched in August to develop a computer model of E.coli. The International E.coli Alliance includes labs in the United States, Europe, and Japan, according to Barry Wanner, professor of microbiology and molecular genetics at Purdue University and a leader of the effort.

"We're trying to learn everything about a living organism. In spite of the fact we've been studying for 60 years, and we have an enormous amount of information about it—about 30 percent of its proteins have been crystallized—we still can't put it together," says Wanner, head of the E.coli Model Cell Consortium, created in March, whose 50 members form the U.S. component of the international alliance.

"We need different ways of probing the system. We need computational methods, we need chemical methods," adds Wanner, who believes that an in silicoE.coli would advance knowledge of human medicine because it would show the dynamics of a living cell's behavior.

James Bassingthwaighte, professor of bioengineering and radiology at the University of Washington notes that such a model would also be a powerful tool in industrial planning. "It allows you to design E.coli and redesign E.coli for particular purposes," such as producing pharmaceuticals, says Bassingthwaighte, a longtime proponent of biological modeling, who is working to model a human heart cell.

An E.coli modeling effort has been underway for a dozen years in the laboratory of Bernhard Palsson, professor of bioengineering and medicine at the University of California at San Diego. According to Palsson, who is a member of the U.S. consortium, his models "account for 2000 open reading frames out of 4300 or so," and he is able to model approximately 1100 metabolic reactions of the organism.

Such model-building projects, Palsson notes, do not have endpoints like a sequencing effort, such as the Human Genome Project or the effort that sequenced the E.coli genome.

"Let's just assume we have a true in silico representation of E.coli," explains Palsson. "That model can respond to an infinite number of different environments in different ways. You will never characterize all of those. What we have discovered, however, is that even if there are an infinite number of possible environments, the number of internal states of E.coli is finite. Going out and characterizing all these states, that's an effort that will take dozens of labs to complete. It's probably a 10-year project."

Wanner will be meeting with 11 other leaders of the International E.coli Alliance in November, in part, he says, to recruit more European laboratories for the effort.