How precise an image can fluorescence microscopy provide?
As modern optics and cell biology have flourished in recent years, they’ve each driven innovation in the other. Yet commonly employed imaging techniques, such as fluorescence microscopy, have...
Sep, 01, 2011
Exploring the current state of connectomics--in the midst of hype
Connectomics is having a moment. Following on the heels of genomics, proteomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics, and microbiomics, the latest “omic” to seize the spotlight is generating...
Jun, 20, 2013
As barriers to massive imaging collections fall, researchers can look at human systems in their entirety rather than in pieces
In the beginning there was the Visible Human. It broke new ground by gathering some 2,000 serial images from a death row inmate’s cadaver, and was the first time researchers had sectioned a...
Jul, 01, 2007
During the final step of cell division, a ring of proteins pinches the cell in two—a process often likened to a purse string drawing shut. The analogy evokes a picture of thread-like proteins...
Apr, 01, 2008
New approaches extend multiscale models to represent cellular mesoscales and bridge from molecular to cellular models
In an era of increasingly comprehensive molecular characterizations of living systems, computation has emerged as a key technology to facilitate integrative understanding of biological mechanisms....
Feb, 19, 2013
Ecce Homology is a physically interactive new-media work that visualizes genetic data as calligraphic forms.
A group of artists and scientists has created an interactive artwork using BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool), one of the foundational algorithms for comparative genomics. Normally, the BLAST...
Sep, 01, 2005
Filling a gap in single molecule experimental work
Scientists sometimes find themselves up to their elbows in Styrofoam balls, pipe cleaners, and metal rods as they try to build models of the molecules they are studying. Now, they can exchange all...
Apr, 01, 2010
Janelia farmers pursue novel, cross-disciplinary collaborations to work on long-term, unwieldy scientific problems difficult to tackle in a single laboratory
The folks at Howard Hughes Medical Institute who dreamed up Janelia Farm say it is as much a social innovation as a scientific one. “We are creating a different culture here,” says Gerald...
Jul, 01, 2006
Anton: A computer dedicated to molecular dynamics simulations.
In biology, many exciting events happen on the millisecond timescale—proteins fold, channels open and close, and enzymes act on their substrates. Atomic-level simulations of this duration are...
Oct, 01, 2008
By computationally combining incomplete imaging information with bits and pieces of structural data from all sorts of different experiments, researchers have worked out the protein-by-protein structure of an important cellular assembly called the nuclear pore complex.
Like puzzles? Here’s a tough one: Try figuring out the construction of a nearly 500-piece machine without blueprints or a complete picture. Biologists have now accomplished just such a feat,...
Apr, 01, 2008
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