OpenSim 2.0 promises greater opportunities for customization
With its initial release two years ago, OpenSim offered researchers a powerful open-source application for simulating movement. Simple enough to be used by high school students yet advanced enough to...
Jan, 01, 2010
"Fold-It" players find best protein conformations to fight cancer
When it comes to folding proteins, even modern supercomputers don’t always get things exactly right. Enter FoldIt, an online video game that harnesses the human brain’s natural pattern-...
Jan, 01, 2010
Computers and human experts duke it out over who is better at diagnosing disease, interpreting images, or predicting protein structure
Dorothy Rosenthal tenses over her microscope, peering at the problematic nucleus on the Pap smear yet again. “It’s abnormal,” she decides, and then hesitates. “No, it’s...
Jul, 01, 2006
A newly created molecular computer works in human cells and offers the flexibility of a general-purpose circuit. The advance, described in Nature Biotechnology in May, brings closer the eventual...
Oct, 01, 2007
How errors in data, software, and methodology can teach us how to do better
In 2006, a paper in Nature Medicine suggested a novel and potentially revolutionary method for predicting patient responses to cancer therapies using gene signatures. The finding piqued the interest...
Sep, 01, 2011
One of our goals at Biomedical Computation Review is to create a sense of kinship among members of this very diverse community of researchers. This column provides reviews of some of the latest and...
Jun, 01, 2005
The antiviral drugs Tamiflu and Relenza target a key flu protein—neuraminidase—preventing it from doing its job of releasing virus particles from infected cells into the body. The type of...
Jul, 01, 2009
Researcher coaxes long strands of DNA into predetermined geometric shapes
Designing nanostructures of DNA just got easier. Paul Rothemund, PhD, a senior research fellow at Caltech has found a way to coax a long strand of DNA into a predetermined geometric shape by mixing...
Jul, 01, 2006
Using computation, researchers narrow the search space for directed evolution; guide mutagenesis; and create de novo enzymes
Enzymes are among nature’s crowning achievements: they accelerate chemical reactions, making life possible. People have co-opted natural enzymes for industrial use for thousands of years (think...
Feb, 19, 2013
Despite their identical genomes, cells in the body develop distinct personalities—become neurons or liver cells, for instance—due to differences in gene expression. The mechanism that...
Apr, 01, 2009