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
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
An opportunity and a challenge
When discussing biocomputation startups, there’s one thing people agree on: These days, they don’t generate much excitement among venture capitalists.
“In the 1990s, there...
Apr, 01, 2007
Using computation, researchers narrow the search space for directed evolution; guide mutagenesis; and create de novo enzymes
Enzymes are among nature’s crowning achievements: they accelerate chemical reactions, making life possible. People have co-opted natural enzymes for industrial use for thousands of years (think...
Feb, 19, 2013
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
Using a 3-D computer model, scientists have simulated stem cells growing within a scaffold to predict which combination of properties will produce the most bone
Designing a scaffold, the internal structure that helps patients regenerate bone, is a delicate balancing act. The scaffold must be strong enough to protect the injury, porous enough to allow...
Jan, 01, 2008
Understanding how actin produces force by pushing rather than squeezing
Rocketing within and between human gut cells, Listeria monocytogenes—a motile, foodborne bacterium—leaves a comet-like tail of actin protein behind it and makes us sick. Scientists have...
Jan, 01, 2010
The clear winner: Big Data
Several biomedical computing projects received big money in the fall of 2012. If there’s one clear winner, it’s “Big Data”: three of the grants focus on building new...
Feb, 19, 2013
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
New approaches extend multiscale models to represent cellular mesoscales and bridge from molecular to cellular models
In an era of increasingly comprehensive molecular characterizations of living systems, computation has emerged as a key technology to facilitate integrative understanding of biological mechanisms....
Feb, 19, 2013