HAP-SAMPLE takes real data as the template for simulations
Trying to find the genetic causes of a human disease requires lots of data. These days, researchers scan the genomes of people who do and don’t have a particular disease and look for genome-...
Jan, 01, 2008
Automated Function Prediction conference launches a new field
At the birth of a new field, a conference can act as a midwife, making sure the infant enters the world smoothly. Such was the case for the Automated Function Prediction (AFP) conference held at the...
Jan, 01, 2007
How errors in data, software, and methodology can teach us how to do better
In 2006, a paper in Nature Medicine suggested a novel and potentially revolutionary method for predicting patient responses to cancer therapies using gene signatures. The finding piqued the interest...
Sep, 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
According to a new computational analysis of DNA structure, variations in DNA shape—along the grooves of the double helix—may play an important role in defining how the genome works. The...
Jul, 01, 2009
The fittest organisms survive and produce offspring, according to the Darwinian theory of natural selection. And the changes that make an organism fit happen at the molecular level: when genes mutate...
Oct, 01, 2007
From hardened software to scientific productivity, the NCBCs have changed the landscape for biomedical computing. What will happen when their funding expires?
It has been eight years since the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded the first National Centers for Biomedical Computing (NCBCs). With two or three years remaining in the program (...
Oct, 19, 2012
The importance of developing and deploying tools for the quantitative clinician scientist
The word Om (or Aum) has many meanings in ancient Hindu philosophy, one of which is “that which contains all other sounds.” The meaning has relevance to the now commonly used suffix...
Jun, 01, 2010
A robot that develops hypotheses of its own
Robots already have a place in many labs, automating tedious tasks such as pipetting samples. But a new system designed at Aberystwyth University in the United Kingdom has taken laboratory automation...
Jul, 01, 2009
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