It's an exhilarating time for genome-wide association studies
For the past few months it seemed you couldn’t open a journal without reading results of a new genome-wide association study. The results kept pouring in: four studies in April showing seven...
Oct, 01, 2007
Bioinformatics and computational biology enable microbiome research
This past June, 200 members of the NIH-funded Human Microbiome Project (HMP) Consortium published a slew of papers offering fresh insights into the role microbial communities play in the human body...
Oct, 22, 2012
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
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
Computing airflow dynamics
We can’t see them, but tiny particles—dust, pollen, microbes, and the like—swirl around us in complicated, turbulent pathways. New numerical simulations suggest that, at least in...
Jun, 01, 2010
Seeking a non-invasive approach to cancer diagnosis and prognosis
In a radiological image, a tumor’s edges might appear fuzzy or crisp; its shape could range from oval to many-lobed; and its density and texture might vary across the tumor. To determine...
Jun, 19, 2013
The antiviral drugs Tamiflu and Relenza target a key flu protein—neuraminidase—preventing it from doing its job of releasing virus particles from infected cells into the body. The type of...
Jul, 01, 2009
How adding jet packs to characters' hands can help optimize animations
An animated human figure seeking the optimal path from point A to point B typically relies on computationally expensive hard constraints that force the trajectories to be physically realistic. But...
Jun, 20, 2013
The Principal Investigators weigh in
Ever since the National Institutes of Health (NIH) began funding the National Centers for Biomedical Computing (NCBCs) just over seven years ago, these powerhouses have been plugging away, building...
Feb, 29, 2012
The Millisecond is Attained!
Scientists have now simulated protein folding at a timescale that begins to be relevant to biology: the millisecond. Indeed, the simulation busted through the millisecond time barrier to tackle the...
Apr, 01, 2010