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
Using Rosetta@Home, a program that runs on the personal computers of 150,000 volunteers worldwide, David Baker’s team predicted the structure of a 112-amino-acid protein from scratch.
When nature folds an amino acid sequence into a protein, it usually knows that just one conformation is the right one. But when a computer tries to do the same thing, it often predicts multiple...
Jan, 01, 2008
Having developed detailed and sophisticated models of both E. Coli and human metabolism, researchers can begin to build toward a whole cell model that will be useful for the study of human health and disease.
If biologists really understood the functioning of the genome, they could in principle recreate it in silico. Instead of a choreographed swirl of molecules inside a living cell, electrons...
Oct, 01, 2008
According to a new computational analysis of DNA structure, variations in DNA shape—along the grooves of the double helix—may play an important role in defining how the genome works. The...
Jul, 01, 2009
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
In a classic cartoon, a physician offers a second opinion from his computer. The patient looks horrified: How absurd to think that a computer could have better judgment than a human doctor! But...
Jan, 01, 2010
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
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
A recognition of biocomputing's successes and a prediction of what's to come
The last ten years have seen huge leaps in biomedical computing. We now have new ways to integrate and understand vast quantities of data; the capacity for multi-scale biological modeling; and a...
bioinformatics tools, biomedical computing, CAD, computational modeling, data mining, disease surveillance, dynamic modeling, education, eric jakobsson, function prediction, genetic association, genome annotation, in silico screening, medical informatics, neuromodeling, prosthetics, sequence alignment, structure prediction, systems biology, systems biomedicine, telemedicine, tomography
Jun, 01, 2005
Bringing models closer to reality
When the ill-fated space shuttle Columbia launched on January 16, 2003, a large piece of foam fell off and hit the left wing. Alerted of the impact, NASA engineers used a computer model to predict...
Oct, 19, 2012