How does a simple petri dish of DNA constitute the identity of a complex human being—from the way she laughs to her love of Cocoa Krispies? It turns out that the question of how biology determines identity interests not only the philosophically-inclined, but those in the drug and healthcare industry as well. In a recent study published in Molecular Systems Biology, a computational biology team at Columbia explored the very questions that drive the current research on personalized care: How does a cell take a genotype and translate it into a phenotype?
