Who?    

Who can find such solutions with all these little pieces? Anyone with a keen interest in solving puzzles and ready access to a PC, an Excel spreadsheet, and a copy of the Enterprise Biology Software can become a player. 

The software package offers players puzzles to solve.  Last year, for example, it invited the reader to solve a molecular biology puzzle that would allow us to reverse engineer biology up to and including molecules.

Consider this.  Molecular biology uses largely optical densities to estimate the concentrations of molecules, both in vivo and in vitro.  Recall that a concentration is the number of particles contained within a unit volume or area of reference space.  Here is the puzzle. 

Puzzle #4: How can we connect an optical density (concentration) -  measured in and referenced to a tube, dish, well, section, chip, or gel - to something biological using equations populated with data coming from unbiased sampling methods? 

In short, how do we connect molecular biology to the rest of biology - mathematically - by following biological rules?

A solution to this puzzle can be found with the help of hybrid hierarchy equations fitted with gold standards.  Such equations can connect in vivo data across all sixteen levels of the biological hierarchy because they follow the rules.  This solution works beautifully because it employs a common mathematical framework for collecting, integrating, and interpreting the in vivo data of stereology, biochemistry, molecular biology, and immunocytochemistry.