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
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
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
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
Postdocs get a glance at the entire field and their first inside view of NIH grant-making
If he were a graduate student now, Francis Collins would be studying computational biology. That’s what the Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) told a rapt audience at the...
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
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
They're more than just pretty pictures adorning office walls and presentation slides. Beamed into operating room computer monitors, they're guiding the scalpels of brain surgeons. Dancing...
Jan, 01, 2012
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
To understand biology—and provide appropriate medical care—scientists need to understand interactions across multiple scales. Hence the Physiome.
This is the reality of human biology: events span a 109 range in lengthscale (molecular to organismal) and a 1014 range in timescale (molecular movement to years). To understand this biology—...
Jun, 01, 2010