They've gone from hype to backlash. Now it's time for reality: How microarrays are being used to benefit healthcare
When DNA microarray technology emerged more than a decade ago, it was met with unbridled enthusiasm. By allowing scientists to look at the expression of enormous numbers of genes in the genome...
Oct, 01, 2006
Biomarker research, genetics, and imaging are all coming into play
In 1906, at a small medical meeting in Tübingen, Germany, physician Alois Alzheimer gave a now-famous presentation about a puzzling patient. At age 51, Auguste D.’s memory was failing...
Oct, 01, 2007
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
The study of HIV evolution is not only critical to fighting the virus; it has also driven advances in the computational tools used to study evolution in general.
When Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, it would be decades before HIV would jump from monkeys to humans and set off a devastating worldwide pandemic. But evolution is at the heart of...
Jul, 01, 2009
Early evidence suggests a mixed picture
Stanford University’s 2004-2005 computer science T-shirts exhibited symbols for six men and one woman -- an accurate portrayal of the ratio in the department and only slightly worse than the...
Apr, 01, 2006
Either/or molecular circuitry modeled
To differentiate or not to differentiate? That is the question constantly faced by embryonic stem cells. And they seem to answer it decisively at the behest of a molecular trio of transcription...
Jan, 01, 2007
Simulations can teach us how young bodies and faces develop; how an artery compensates for decades of fatty plaque deposits by growing and thickening its walls; how tissue engineers can best coax endothelial cells to develop into organized sheets of skin for burn patients; and how cancerous tumors invade neighboring tissue.
For better or for worse, and on many levels, our tissues never stop growing and changing. While developing from childhood to old age, we grow not only bone, cartilage, fat, muscle and skin, but also...
Apr, 01, 2008
How social media sites are rapidly doing unique research on large cohorts
It has become commonplace for people to use social media to share their healthcare stories, seek a community of individuals with the same diseases, and learn about treatment options. All this...
Jan, 02, 2012
The availability of free and open access data, models, and software indisputably accelerates scientific progress. Unfortunately, dissemination necessitates organization, documentation, and quality...
Jan, 01, 2010
Public databases impact not only how research is done but what kind of research is done in the first place.
The setting: a scientific conference in January 2008. The speaker, Bruce Ponder, MD, PhD, an oncology professor at Cambridge University, is describing a previously unknown link between a particular...
Oct, 01, 2008