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
Computational simulations of life in motion at every scale—molecular, cellular, tissue-level, and whole organism—are boosting our understanding of the role mechanics plays in controlling life.
From atoms and molecules to insects, dinosaurs, and humans, computational researchers are finding that much of life can be understood in mechanical terms. Indeed, the machines of life are...
Jan, 01, 2008
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
Advances in computational power and algorithms have led to longer and more accurate molecular dynamics simulations of protein folding. But these approaches, because they are computationally intensive...
Jun, 06, 2012
How precise an image can fluorescence microscopy provide?
As modern optics and cell biology have flourished in recent years, they’ve each driven innovation in the other. Yet commonly employed imaging techniques, such as fluorescence microscopy, have...
Sep, 01, 2011
Bioinformatics and computational biology enable microbiome research
This past June, 200 members of the NIH-funded Human Microbiome Project (HMP) Consortium published a slew of papers offering fresh insights into the role microbial communities play in the human body...
Oct, 22, 2012
Biomarker research, genetics, and imaging are all coming into play
In 1906, at a small medical meeting in Tübingen, Germany, physician Alois Alzheimer gave a now-famous presentation about a puzzling patient. At age 51, Auguste D.’s memory was failing...
Oct, 01, 2007
Contests involving algorithms for protein structure prediction, natural language processing, and computer-aided disease detection are giving researchers a jolt of adrenalin and moving these fields forward
From all parts of the computational spectrum, researchers are duking it out: They are throwing their algorithms into the ring to see which one will out-perform all others on a particular task....
Jul, 01, 2006
Plot shows how functional communities in yeast protein interaction networks change in size and nature at different levels of resolution
Splashes of bold color seem to drip down the page, bringing to mind the paintings of Jackson Pollock. Spurred by the beauty of the image she had created, Anna Lewis,* a graduate student studying...
Apr, 01, 2011
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