Gene therapy to correct inherited illnesses hinges on successful delivery of DNA into a person’s cells. Most gene therapists work with viruses to ferry their DNA cargo. Yet the body tends to...
Oct, 01, 2009
Can the complexities of biology be boiled down to Amazon.com-style recommendations? The examples here suggest possible pathways to an intelligent healthcare system with big data at its core.
“We have recommendations for you,” announces the website Amazon.com each time a customer signs in.
This mega-retailer analyzes billions of customers’ purchases—nearly $...
Jan, 02, 2012
Computation offers a window into a disease often described as a black box
The growing threats of multi-drug resistant (MDR) and extensively drug resistant (XDR) tuberculosis (TB) are spurring worldwide interest in faster and more innovative research approaches, such as...
Jun, 06, 2012
While science educators actively debate the relative merits of teaching natural science in an integrated fashion, some authors are writing texts that will make it happen. Philip Nelson’s book,...
Jun, 01, 2005
Modelers are using recent gains in computational power to consider the complex interactions of hundreds or thousands of macromolecules at once--a necessary first step toward whole cell simulation
Molecules in cells behave like people in crowded subway cars. Because they can barely budge or stretch out without bumping into a neighbor, they move more slowly, smush themselves into more compact...
Apr, 01, 2011
A pair of challenges increasingly threaten the success of bioinformatics research: convincing biologists to share their data and convincing computational colleagues to share their code. Many of us...
Jul, 01, 2006
The study of HIV evolution is not only critical to fighting the virus; it has also driven advances in the computational tools used to study evolution in general.
When Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, it would be decades before HIV would jump from monkeys to humans and set off a devastating worldwide pandemic. But evolution is at the heart of...
Jul, 01, 2009
A debate
Say you are performing biomolecular investigations that are extremely compute intensive. You have a finite amount of money and time. You could get (1) a supercomputer (fast custom CPUs and high-speed...
Oct, 01, 2009
Helping newcomers understand the lay of the land
As a program manager in biomedical computing and computational biology at the National Institutes of Health, I field many questions, particularly from new investigators. They ask questions like:...
Apr, 01, 2010
When you step on the gas pedal, you expect acceleration (and lots of it). Stomp on the brake to come safely to a stop in the rain. Finger the power-assisted steering wheel and the car obeys. Make a...
Oct, 01, 2009