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
As leaders and participants of an effort to build an infrastructure that enables biomedical computing on a broad basis, it is incumbent upon us to define clear and challenging goals that will dazzle the world
The world changed when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon in 1969. Humans could survive outside the earth’s atmosphere! Science and engineering could achieve great things! And the nerds at the...
Jan, 01, 2008
There is growing recognition that epigenetics may be just as important as genetics in human health and disease.
In the early 19th century, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck explained evolution as the inheritance of acquired traits; he believed that changes due to behaviors and exposures in one generation could be passed...
Jun, 01, 2010
Several big-dollar initiatives received NIH funding in late 2010
In the current economic climate, every research dollar counts. Fortunately, when it comes to biomedical computing, not everyone has been left counting change. Several big-dollar initiatives received...
Apr, 01, 2011
The flu virus is an evolutionary marvel. Teams of experts design an appropriate flu vaccine annually just to keep up with the microbe’s ability to evade the human immune system. Multiple...
Jul, 01, 2006
Bringing models closer to reality
When the ill-fated space shuttle Columbia launched on January 16, 2003, a large piece of foam fell off and hit the left wing. Alerted of the impact, NASA engineers used a computer model to predict...
Oct, 19, 2012
AMOEBA's polarizable force field now integrated with OpenMM
Many have long hoped that molecular dynamics calculations—the computation of how molecules move and interact with other molecules—would revolutionize the world of synthetic chemistry,...
Sep, 01, 2011
A combination of genomics data and molecular dynamics modeling is sufficient to predict protein complex structure
The zone where two proteins interact presents a possible target for drug design. But identifying possible drugs requires a detailed understanding of the interface between the proteins. Computer...
Apr, 01, 2010
Scientists have long wondered how many genes are necessary to support life. This knowledge could be used to construct new forms of artificial life to efficiently produce better biofuels or drugs....
Jan, 01, 2008
Having developed detailed and sophisticated models of both E. Coli and human metabolism, researchers can begin to build toward a whole cell model that will be useful for the study of human health and disease.
If biologists really understood the functioning of the genome, they could in principle recreate it in silico. Instead of a choreographed swirl of molecules inside a living cell, electrons...
Oct, 01, 2008