Public databases impact not only how research is done but what kind of research is done in the first place.
The setting: a scientific conference in January 2008. The speaker, Bruce Ponder, MD, PhD, an oncology professor at Cambridge University, is describing a previously unknown link between a particular...
Oct, 01, 2008
It's an exhilarating time for genome-wide association studies
For the past few months it seemed you couldn’t open a journal without reading results of a new genome-wide association study. The results kept pouring in: four studies in April showing seven...
Oct, 01, 2007
How researchers are combining disparate data types and simulating systems that contain many different moving parts
13 years ago Markus Covert, PhD, read a New York Times article that changed his life. The article quoted a prominent microbiologist who suggested that the ultimate test of one’s...
Feb, 16, 2013
In three dimensions, researchers can now visualize the location and activity of more than 21,000 genes in a normal mouse brain. The Allen Brain Atlas, funded with $100 million in seed money...
Jan, 01, 2007
Metagenomes give a picture of the genes driving metabolic processes important to bacterial growth and survival in different environments.
We know they are there, but most microbial denizens of deep oceans, sea floor vents, even our own intestines, remain a mystery. Because most microbes won’t grow in the lab, researchers have few...
Jul, 01, 2008
Supercomputers open up new horizons, offering the possibility of discovering new ways to understand life’s complexity
Their very names sound like dinosaurs. Teracomputers. Petacomputers. These are, in fact, the dinosaurs of the digital world—monstrous, hungry and powerful. But unlike the extinct...
Oct, 01, 2006
And people are starting to notice
In 1991, a prescient editorial in Nature by Harvard’s Walter Gilbert, PhD, (“Towards a paradigm shift in biology”) included these observations on the utility and impact of computing...
Apr, 01, 2006
Affinity propagation clusters lots of different kinds of data better and faster than other methods
Starting in preschool we all learn how to get organized. Typically, we start with pre-determined categories (dolls, trains, blocks); pre-set ideas about what belongs in each category (Barbie: doll;...
Jul, 01, 2007
Many new drugs carry a risk that they will cause more problems than they cure. That’s because a drug intended to bind one protein might also bind others. In an effort to address that problem,...
Apr, 01, 2008
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