ABSTRACT
A study of the ‘synthetic problem’ would thus, by providing genotype-phenotype mappings for simple synthetic systems, help to connect two major areas of biological theory: the biochemical and the population genetic. As molecular biology refines its description of cellular machinery, this ability to ask meaningful theoretical questions will increase. The successes of molecular biology in isolating and determining the function of many cellular components has made more acute the dilemma that ‘theoretical biology’ has no simple method for dealing with the synthetic problem’. The problem of the quantitative prediction of systems composed of large numbers of different but, in principle, well described components. Perhaps the best approach to population genetic studies will be to consider the nature of the genotype-phenotype relation at the physiological level in the hope that some relatively simple rules for compounding genetic effects operating through a metabolic network can be discovered.
