Understanding how actin produces force by pushing rather than squeezing
Rocketing within and between human gut cells, Listeria monocytogenes—a motile, foodborne bacterium—leaves a comet-like tail of actin protein behind it and makes us sick. Scientists have...
Jan, 01, 2010
iHOP organizes interconnected information
Text-mining tools such as iHOP (Information Hyperlinked Over Proteins) are doing for biological literature what hyperlinks and search engines do for the Internet: organizing interconnected...
Apr, 01, 2007
In the past, many biomechanical models of gait have omitted the arms. But as such models strive for greater realism, it has become more important to account for secondary movement by the arms.
Most people swing their arms when they walk. Indeed, like several characters in a classic Seinfeld episode, we’re surprised when they don’t. Yet we don’t really need to swing our...
Jul, 01, 2008
Biomechanical models contribute to a better understanding of both the normal and the diseased eye.
Squint, and you can almost make out that bird soaring over the horizon. But determining whether it’s a hawk or a raven will be nearly impossible for someone with myopia, also known as...
Feb, 19, 2013
They've gone from hype to backlash. Now it's time for reality: How microarrays are being used to benefit healthcare
When DNA microarray technology emerged more than a decade ago, it was met with unbridled enthusiasm. By allowing scientists to look at the expression of enormous numbers of genes in the genome...
Oct, 01, 2006
Thirty years ago, molecular biologists routinely constructed protein models out of brass rods (“Kendrew models”). In recent years, researchers put away such tinker toys and turned to...
Aug, 31, 2005
Try packing a two-meter-long stretch of DNA into a cell nucleus just a few millionths of a meter thick—with key coding segments readily accessible. It’s a seemingly impossible feat that...
Oct, 01, 2009
How Simbios' state-of-the-art software tools are contributing to high-impact biomedical research
Simbios began with a simple idea: that physics-based simulation of biological structures at all scales could benefit from a
unified tool-building effort.
At the same time, the thinking went,...
Oct, 01, 2009
Advances in visualization changing work flows for understanding molecular dynamics, tracking cell movements, and designing interventional procedures
The pathway from raw data to valuable visualization of molecules, cells or organs being simulated over time involves several potentially painstaking steps. Typically, researchers must generate a set...
Sep, 02, 2011
New approaches extend multiscale models to represent cellular mesoscales and bridge from molecular to cellular models
In an era of increasingly comprehensive molecular characterizations of living systems, computation has emerged as a key technology to facilitate integrative understanding of biological mechanisms....
Feb, 19, 2013