The challenge for physiome projects

With an ever-increasing amount of genetic information being generated, a primary challenge becomes the refinement of data into a useful product. In a recent issue of Nature, researchers have demonstrated such an application by successfully modeling the behavior of a mutant sodium channel in heart muscle cells.

The researchers from Case Western Reserve University (Cleveland, Ohio) noted that most ion-channel defect studies are conducted in isolated expression systems, making it difficult to establish a link between molecular findings and cellular phenotype because data from such systems do not portray an exact picture of what happens in the native system...