Abstract
The quest for relevant correlation between chemico-physical properties of molecules and their biological activity is a unique vantage point where to look at the rising need of “deliberately incomplete” models. While the golden rule “the more complex (i.e. more near to biology and the more distant from chemistry) the more coarse must be the approach” has no exception, it is not easy to immediately locate a particular problem along this complexity axis. Thus complex task as the prediction of the therapeutic effect of a drug allow for fully quantitative models, while apparently “less complex” properties like protein flexibility ask for deliberately coarse grain models. The long story of Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationships (QSAR) in pharmacology and toxicology gives us some enlightening examples of the relevance of the context and of the particular question we ask to Nature in determining the most efficient modeling attitudes in terms of a conscious and deliberate use of incompleteness.
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Giuliani, A. (2019). All the Shades of Incompleteness: The Interesting Case of Structure/Function Relations in Biochemistry. In: Minati, G., Abram, M., Pessa, E. (eds) Systemics of Incompleteness and Quasi-Systems. Contemporary Systems Thinking. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15277-2_3
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