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
Disentangling the different types of skeptics and what modelers can learn from each.
What are the telltale signs of a modeling talk at a biology conference? Just look for the sighs, shifting, and eye-rolling in the audience, says Donald C. Bolser, PhD, professor of physiological...
Jun, 05, 2012
Mimicking the social behavior of groups of animals to search for the minimum value of an objective function
Optimizing the solution to a problem occurs commonly in engineering and in nature. The Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm borrows ideas from nature and is a fairly new method of...
Jan, 01, 2007
Classifying variability of gene expression
Genetically identical cells or organisms grown in identical environments will differ phenotypically, because—even with a common script—gene expression is inherently variable, or noisy....
Apr, 01, 2006
There comes a tipping point in systems-biology studies of gene function where knowing some genes’ functions can, using a computational approach, help hone in on the functions of other genes....
Apr, 01, 2010
Models of healthy and diseased lipid profiles could prove valuable diagnostically.
When it comes to heart disease risk, “bad” and “good” cholesterol—also known as low density lipoproteins [LDL] and high density lipoproteins [HDL]—do not tell...
Oct, 01, 2008
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
A debate
Say you are performing biomolecular investigations that are extremely compute intensive. You have a finite amount of money and time. You could get (1) a supercomputer (fast custom CPUs and high-speed...
Oct, 01, 2009
Can the complexities of biology be boiled down to Amazon.com-style recommendations? The examples here suggest possible pathways to an intelligent healthcare system with big data at its core.
“We have recommendations for you,” announces the website Amazon.com each time a customer signs in.
This mega-retailer analyzes billions of customers’ purchases—nearly $...
Jan, 02, 2012