Now, with just a few mouse clicks, anyone with a computer and an Internet connection can create graphic images of RNA molecules (using ToRNADo) or generate the ion environments that surround these...
Jan, 01, 2007
From hardened software to scientific productivity, the NCBCs have changed the landscape for biomedical computing. What will happen when their funding expires?
It has been eight years since the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded the first National Centers for Biomedical Computing (NCBCs). With two or three years remaining in the program (...
Oct, 19, 2012
Modelers should take the lead.
Many collaborators 1 with whom modelers2 work have little or no training in modeling3 and so it is natural that they may be cautious,...
Jun, 05, 2012
Decades of steady progress in pharmacogenetics have unearthed hundreds of associations between genes and drug response. But the field has to solve some theoretical and practical issues before it can deliver on the promise of personalized drug therapy.
As algorithms go, it’s deceptively simple. Just add together eight weighted pieces of patient information—age, height, weight, race, data about two genes, and a pair of clinical...
Jul, 01, 2009
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
Computational modeling can help fill gaps in how we develop and review new drugs and devices
What role does computational modeling play at the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA)? If you ask Paul Watkins, MD, director of the Hamner—University of North Carolina...
Sep, 01, 2011
How Simbios' state-of-the-art software tools are contributing to high-impact biomedical research
Simbios began with a simple idea: that physics-based simulation of biological structures at all scales could benefit from a
unified tool-building effort.
At the same time, the thinking went,...
Oct, 01, 2009
Mutual information (MI) is defined in information theory as a measure of the dependencies between two random variables. There are many biomedical applications in which it is beneficial to quantify...
Jul, 01, 2007
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
Epistasis explored
When people work together, some individuals may hinder team performance—essentially masking the abilities of other members—while others may boost the group’s performance beyond the...
Sep, 01, 2011