Computer modeling may help narrow the molecular landscape to the best drug prospects
Every pharmaceutical company wants to find the next blockbuster drug. Yet finding molecules with a complete set of desired properties is tricky because of the astronomical number of medium-sized...
Jul, 01, 2006
Researchers examine the connection between editorial boards of medical informatics and bioinformatics journals
How ideas spread gets at the very fabric of scholarly research and has been studied from many different angles.
Many studies examine person-to-person connectivity in social networks. Within a...
Jul, 01, 2007
Moving from intuition to evidence-based intervention
To understand how muscles contract and joints flex, researchers have dissected cadavers and experimented with animals. They can describe how bones, muscles, and tendons connect in a complicated...
Jan, 01, 2007
Metagenomes give a picture of the genes driving metabolic processes important to bacterial growth and survival in different environments.
We know they are there, but most microbial denizens of deep oceans, sea floor vents, even our own intestines, remain a mystery. Because most microbes won’t grow in the lab, researchers have few...
Jul, 01, 2008
Connectivity Map helps connect drugs and diseases
Normal cells, diseased cells and cells on drugs share a common language: They all produce their own patterns of gene expression. And the patterns can be compared in useful ways—given a disease...
Jan, 01, 2007
Current methods of tracking the flu all come with a bit of a time lag—which is unfortunate when trying to monitor for potential pandemics like today’s swine flu crisis. There is a faster...
Jul, 01, 2009
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
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
How cell-centered models are adding fundamental insights into our understanding of cell behaviors
The cell is like our financial system: Even if you have a diagram of all the complex interactions going on, you still cannot intuit how the whole system will react when perturbed. Indeed, the cell...
Apr, 01, 2010
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