This may sound like a naive approach, but is there anything special hindering us from building such a simulator or is it just that scientists will not find it useful as it will take too long before we know which nucleotides are important for our goals?
This is hard. To my knowledge we can't even write most basic components of a cell simulator yet. One of the obvious requirements would be a protein folding simulator. Nobody has been able to come up with a working one of those yet.
> when I have a simulator I can try changing them and see what happens?
If you write a simulator that does this you will be a billionaire and probably win a Nobel prize in medicine while you're at it.
If anyone is interested in this work, check their job site. Last I heard they were looking to hire a programmer to help write the sim. Cool team + science.
It was funny to notice that they seem to value a Bachelor's degree at a rate of higher than 1:1 with career experience:
> 4-5 years of experience in a software development team AND a bachelor’s degree in computer science or a related field | OR 15+ years of relevant working experience...
> 6-9 years of experience in a software development team AND a bachelor’s degree in computer science or a related field | OR 20+ years of relevant working experience
That is a pretty heavy premium to put on those years during undergrad. I certainly wasn't as good by undergrad + 5 years as at 15+ years in the field, but maybe they know better than me.
Is there anything better than DFT method for quantum chemistry? You can look it up and see how much effort it takes to simulate just a few molecules.
I'm pretty sure full cell level simulation would revolutionize biology and medicine.