A virtual metabolic network represents intracellular traffic
It’s hard to imagine a map depicting the daily flow of traffic on water, wheels and foot throughout San Diego—or any large city—over the course of a day. “That map can...
Apr, 01, 2007
Using computational models, researchers are gaining traction toward understanding what makes a stem cell a stem cell; how gene expression drives stem cell differentiation; why studying stem cell heterogeneity is important; and, ultimately, how stem cells control their fate.
To the casual observer, stem cells offer the almost magical promise of—Voila!—turning into exactly the kind of cell needed to repair an injured spinal cord or replace a damaged organ. And...
Apr, 01, 2010
A newly created molecular computer works in human cells and offers the flexibility of a general-purpose circuit. The advance, described in Nature Biotechnology in May, brings closer the eventual...
Oct, 01, 2007
AgentCell is the first simulation program to model a biochemical network at the molecular, single cell, and population levels simultaneously.
When a bacterium swims toward food, it follows a chaotic path, alternating between spinning randomly and driving forward, or ‘tumbling’ and ‘running.’ Computer scientists at...
Sep, 01, 2005
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
As barriers to massive imaging collections fall, researchers can look at human systems in their entirety rather than in pieces
In the beginning there was the Visible Human. It broke new ground by gathering some 2,000 serial images from a death row inmate’s cadaver, and was the first time researchers had sectioned a...
Jul, 01, 2007
The National Institutes of Health Roadmap for Medical Research has recently completed the first stage of an ambitious program to expand the computational infrastructure and software tools needed to...
Jan, 01, 2006
How to share knowledge, data, tools, and computational resources in a sustainable manner
Once upon a time, a deep divide existed between scientists who did and those who did not have easy access to scientific content (journals, lectures, data), hardware (imaging devices, lab instruments...
Apr, 01, 2011
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
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