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
The first four National Centers for Biomedical Computing take off
WHY NATIONAL CENTERS?
Four National Centers for Biomedical Computing were launched by the NIH in 2004 with $20 million in funding for each center over five years. The reason: We need to make...
Jun, 01, 2005
An opportunity and a challenge
When discussing biocomputation startups, there’s one thing people agree on: These days, they don’t generate much excitement among venture capitalists.
“In the 1990s, there...
Apr, 01, 2007
Biomarker research, genetics, and imaging are all coming into play
In 1906, at a small medical meeting in Tübingen, Germany, physician Alois Alzheimer gave a now-famous presentation about a puzzling patient. At age 51, Auguste D.’s memory was failing...
Oct, 01, 2007
It’s impossible to predict what the hottest new tools will be, but here are a few gems that caught our attention
Many experimental researchers rely on computational tools to push the pace and productivity of laboratory research. It’s impossible to predict what the hottest new tools will be, but this...
Apr, 01, 2011
Anton: A computer dedicated to molecular dynamics simulations.
In biology, many exciting events happen on the millisecond timescale—proteins fold, channels open and close, and enzymes act on their substrates. Atomic-level simulations of this duration are...
Oct, 01, 2008
Simulating molecular movement gives a more accurate view of binding sites.
If a picture’s worth a thousand words, then a motion picture, such as that provided by molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, must contain a wealth of information. It’s this potential...
Oct, 01, 2008
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
Biologists have long taken gas exchange for granted, assuming that gases simply seep through the cell’s lipid membrane. Since 1998, however, evidence has been building that gases might also be...
Jul, 01, 2007
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