Abstract: The computational analysis and interpretation of the wealth of biological data that is being produced every day is a cogent problem in the life sciences. The task can be mapped to an engineering project were we need to have the parts list, understand their tolerance thresholds, find the assembly instruction and, finally, simulate its behaviour.

Determining the identity and function of all of the sequence elements in human DNA is a daunting challenge that can be approached with various techniques, mainly based on statistics and evolutionary considerations. The next challenge is to correlate variations in the genes and the insurgence of diseases: the human variation data are accumulating with unprecedented speed and they need to be interpreted in order to open the road to their use in medical settings. The assembly of the biological elements, for example, protein-protein interactions are at the basis of most cellular processes and crucial for many bio-technological applications. During the last few years the development of high-throughput technologies has produced several large-scale protein-interaction data sets for various organisms. It is important to develop tools for dissecting their content and analyse the information they contain using data-integration and computational methods. Finally, one would like to simulate the behaviour of whole cells or even whole organs. This area of research is still at its infancy, but it is important to pursue its goals, even with limited and incomplete data.
In our discussion, I will outline which are the main challenges in pursuing the fascinating goal of understanding life at the molecular level.