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
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
Atomistic simulations have the potential to elucidate the molecular basis of biological processes such as protein misfolding in Alzheimer’s disease or the conformational changes that drive...
Jan, 01, 2010
Finding the Master Regulators
A cell may change states several times in its lifetime—from a stem cell to a specialized cell, for example, or from a normal cell to a cancerous one. Each time this happens, a veritable army of...
Apr, 01, 2010
Scientists have long wondered how many genes are necessary to support life. This knowledge could be used to construct new forms of artificial life to efficiently produce better biofuels or drugs....
Jan, 01, 2008
Balancing Breadth and Depth
The last decade saw a proliferation of training programs at the intersection of life science and computation, with more than 60 new degree and certificate programs launched in the United States alone...
Sep, 01, 2005
The National Institutes of Health Roadmap for Medical Research has recently completed the first stage of an ambitious program to expand the computational infrastructure and software tools needed to...
Jan, 01, 2006
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
The complexity and variability of aging itself, along with the fragmented nature of researchers’ current understanding of aging, call for tools that can help scientists dig through mounds of data to find often subtle connections.
Jeanne Louise Calment of Arles, France rode a bicycle until she was 100 years old. When she gave up smoking at age 117, her doctor suspected it was out of pride. (She couldn’t see well enough...
Apr, 01, 2008
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