Simulations can teach us how young bodies and faces develop; how an artery compensates for decades of fatty plaque deposits by growing and thickening its walls; how tissue engineers can best coax endothelial cells to develop into organized sheets of skin for burn patients; and how cancerous tumors invade neighboring tissue.
For better or for worse, and on many levels, our tissues never stop growing and changing. While developing from childhood to old age, we grow not only bone, cartilage, fat, muscle and skin, but also...
Apr, 01, 2008
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
Multi-scale modeling is now at what might be called its gestational stage
For centuries, mathematics has been an indispensable ally of the physical sciences and engineering. Planes fly and telephones work because engineers know how to simplify physical systems into...
Apr, 01, 2006
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
Neighbor cells affect stem cell differentiation in computer simulation
Every generation, a few nonconformists crop up in tissue cultures of genetically identical cells. The question is: are the wayward simply born that way, or did something in the environment affect...
Jul, 01, 2007
Diabetes, breast cancer, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease. All are associated with several genes’ alleles interacting in complex ways with one another and the environment. Now,...
Jul, 01, 2007
High-throughput experimental methods are widely used today to identify genes and proteins involved in a particular process, but not all molecules in a pathway can be identified in this manner. To...
Jul, 01, 2009
The Principal Investigators weigh in
Ever since the National Institutes of Health (NIH) began funding the National Centers for Biomedical Computing (NCBCs) just over seven years ago, these powerhouses have been plugging away, building...
Feb, 29, 2012
Researchers examine the connection between editorial boards of medical informatics and bioinformatics journals
How ideas spread gets at the very fabric of scholarly research and has been studied from many different angles.
Many studies examine person-to-person connectivity in social networks. Within a...
Jul, 01, 2007
Synthetic biologists explain cell behaviors while desinging new ones
Without synchronized clocks—whether embedded in our body’s cells or programmed into our desktop computers—any kind of coordinated activity is impossible. So after synthetic...
Apr, 01, 2010