First computer model of a living being

The complexity of life has prevented scientists to create models of artificial living beings. Up to now.

According to io9, a new scientific project led to the first complete computer model of an organism. This is a first step forward towards creating artificial life and a great achievement in the field of computer models of living organisms.
So far, such efforts have been limited due to the complexity and underlying base to the simpler organisms. Another major challenge was to understand and document all the different "algorithms" that uses a living organism.
Much of the documentation work was done. It needed only someone who caught this and started to model a simulation. A team research led by Stanford Markis Covert, took the information of 900 scientific papers to understand all the interactions of each molecule of the world's smallest bacterium, Mycoplasma genitalium. The bacterium has only 525 genes, when E. coli, for example, includes 4288.
Despite the relative simplicity of this bacterium, the team had to isolate more than 1900 parameters to create the computational equivalent of the bacteria. This gave rise to 28 "modules" separated, each governed by an algorithm. These modules were configured to interact properly with each other. The result was a faithful simulation of the bacteria, which led to new information not previously known to biologists.