To fit inside the cell nucleus, DNA molecules wrap around tiny protein spindles known as histones. These histones carry an intriguing biochemical code that helps decide a cell’s destiny—...
Apr, 01, 2010
It’s impossible to predict what the hottest new tools will be, but here are a few gems that caught our attention
Many experimental researchers rely on computational tools to push the pace and productivity of laboratory research. It’s impossible to predict what the hottest new tools will be, but this...
Apr, 01, 2011
Kids often claim they are just as smart—if not smarter—than their parents. Childish nonsense? Perhaps not, according to a recent study. It turns out that young children’s brains are...
Oct, 01, 2009
Despite their identical genomes, cells in the body develop distinct personalities—become neurons or liver cells, for instance—due to differences in gene expression. The mechanism that...
Apr, 01, 2009
Like humans, cells are affected by their physical environment, their neighbors, the context in which they exist. Much research has focused on the chemical signals that control cell behavior. But...
Sep, 01, 2011
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
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
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
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
Computation can speed up the time it takes to find new binding partners for old drugs
When cheap drugs are needed fast, researchers and drug companies are increasingly turning to an interesting short-cut: repurposing existing drugs for new uses. Because drugs exert multiple actions in...
Apr, 01, 2011