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Novel Asthma Study Shows Multiple Genetic Input Required; Single-gene Solution Shot Down

For patients with high-risk breast cancer treated with radical mastectomy and adjuvant chemotherapy, the addition of radiation therapy leads to better survival outcomes with few long-term toxic effects, according to a 20-year follow-up of a randomized trial, which appears in the January 19 issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. The British Columbia randomized radiation the...

Computers to be used to find blueprint for new influenza drug

Researchers at the University of Bath have won a £261,000 grant to use the latest software to produce a blueprint of a designer drug that could stop influenza and some other diseases from replicating in humans. Professor Ian...

Supercomputer Dedicated To Bioengineering, Computational Biology Installed

The University of California, San Diego, with support from the National Institutes of Health and the Whitaker Foundation, has installed a supercomputer dedicated to solving a wide range of challenging biological problems. The 210-node Dell PowerEdge Linux cluster capable of 2.6 trillion mathematical operations per second, the second most powerful computer cluster on campus, will be used to analyz...

Programmable cells: Engineer turns bacteria into living computers

In a step toward making living cells function as if they were tiny computers, engineers at Princeton have programmed bacteria to communicate with each other and p...

Institute for Systems Biology Symposium Addresses Need for Better Computational Tools

The Institute for Systems Biology announced today at its 2005 international symposium on Computational Challenges in Systems Biology that ISB's Human Proteome Folding Project launched on IBM's World Community Grid in November 2004 has already predicted 50,000 protein structures. "This project showcases the enormous power of collaborations," stated Dr. Richard Bonneau, senior scientist at t...

Computational Method Speeds Mapping of Cell Signaling Networks

For decades, scientists have been studying how external information gets transmitted from outside of cells to the control centers inside them that trigger particular responses. But cell signaling networks are so complex that mapping them has been a slow, arduous process. Now, a research team from Stanford, MIT and Harvard has developed a new method for charting cellular signaling networks...

Growth in biomass could put US on road to energy independence

Relief from soaring prices at the gas pump could come in the form of corncobs, cornstalks, switchgrass and other types of biomass, according to a joint feasibility study for the departments of Agriculture and Energy. The recently completed Oak Ridge National Laboratory report outlines a national strategy in which 1 billion dry tons of biomass ?any organic matter that is available on a rene...

Putting ecology back into river restoration

An ambitious plan is under way in the ecological community to agree a set of standards for ecologically successful river restoration. The plan is being led by the British Ecological Society's Journal of Applied Ecology, which this month is publishing a special profile on river restoration. Opening the debate is a paper by 22 leading US river ecologists proposing five criteria for ecologically suc...

Supercomputers to focus brains on AIDS dilemma

More than two decades after it burst onto the scene, HIV/AIDS has claimed more than twenty million lives and continues to devastate societies around the world, particularly in Africa and other developing countries. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, after years of effort AIDS researchers succeeded in developing a class of drugs that proved to be highly effective against AIDS. By blocking the acti...

Designing vaccines by computer

Having vaccines developed by computer may sound unnerving but the increasing role of computer modelling in the development of new vaccines could bring new products onto the market quicker, benefiting patients and saving pharmaceutical companies millions of pounds. Researchers using informatics and computer modelling can help scientists to uncover and harness the hidden patterns in the weal...

Computational verification of protein-protein interactions by orthologous co-expression

In the March 3 issue of Nature, Johns Hopkins researchers report that two proteins best known for very different activities actually come together to turn the liver into a sugar-producing factory when food is scarce. Because the liver's production of sugar is a damaging problem in people with diabetes, the proteins' interaction might be a target for future drugs to fight the disease, the research...

Computational Tool Predicts How Drugs Work In Cells, Advancing Efforts To Design Better Medicines

The ability to select and develop compounds that act on specific cellular targets has just gained a computational ally ?a mathematical algorithm that predicts the precise effects a given compound will have on a cell’s molecular components or chemical processes. Using this tool, drug developers can design compounds that will act on only desired gene and protein targets, eliciting therapeutic respo...

'Bionic' arm gives amputee sense of touch

Impressive impact factors prove that BioMed Central's Open Access journals are high quality and widely read and cited. Journals published by BioMed Central have again received impact factors that compare well with equivalent subscription titles, it was announced today, with five titles in the top five of their specialty. The high impact factors for these journals affirm that they are respected by...

Using computers and DNA to count bacteria

Don't call them the Dirt Doctors, or Sultans of Soil, they're just clever Lab guys. A team from Los Alamos National Laboratory has a paper in this week's Science Magazine with a new way to count bugs in dirt. Bacteria, that is, in the highly complex world beneath our feet. "Computational Improvements Reveal Great Bacterial Diversity and High Metal Toxicity in Soil," by Jason Gans, Murray W...

High-throughput oncogene mutation detection in human cancers by mass spectrometry-based genotyping

Researchers have devised a new method to detect a spectrum of known gene mutations in a variety of cancer genes that they say is both sensitive and cost-effective. They say that if validated, this method of genotyping might ultimately be used in "real time" to match patients to available targeted therapies. Results were presented at the first meeting on Molecular Diagnostics in Cancer Ther...

UNC computer, marine scientists collaborate to predict flow of toxic waters from Katrina

In the immediate wake of Hurricane Katrina, scientists and research centers from across the country came together to generate information on the contaminated floodwaters and offer it to hazardous materials experts and public health officials. In a matter of hours, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Marine Sciences Program and Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI), together...

Ethical guidelines suggested for research that would put human stem cells in primates

Covering ship hulls with artificial shark skin could help ships sailing smoothly. The growth of marine organisms such as barnacles on ship hulls is a major cause of increased energy costs in the naval industry. Shark skin offers a structural design that prevents this so called 'bio-fouling'. Ralph Liedert from the University of Applied Sciences, Bremen, Germany, is presenting his work on t...

Large-scale Computer Simulations Reveal New Insights Into Antibiotic Resistance

Novel use of genetic testing methods helped public health officials control and limit the further spread of four outbreaks of foodborne hepatitis A virus in 2003 related to the consumption of green onions, according to a detailed analysis published in the October 15 issue of The Journal of Infectious Diseases, now available online. The authors of the study, Joseph J. Amon, PhD, MSPH, and c...

NYU chemists use computer simulation to enhance understanding of DNA transcription

New York University chemists have employed a computer simulation whose results have enhanced scientific understanding of the DNA transcription process. The study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, appears in the June 7 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Previous research has indicated that chromatin--a chromosome's substance consisting of histone prote...

Computers close in on protein structure prediction

Rosetta@home lets public participate in structure prediction. The findings, which were reported in the September 16, 2005, issue of the journal Science, provide a glimmer of hope th...

Computer modeling reveals hidden conversations within cells

University of California, San Diego biochemists have developed a computer program that helps explain a long-standing mystery: how the same proteins can play different roles in a wide range of cellular processes, including those leading to immune responses and cancer. Prior to the UCSD team's findings, which are published in the September 16 issue of the journal Science, many scientists ex...

High-Throughput GoMiner

According to folklore, Polynesians originated from a mythical homeland called Hawaiki. Their origins and the existence of such a place, however, have been the subject of much speculation. In a new study in the premier open access journal PLoS Biology, Jean Trejaut and colleagues now provide the first direct evidence for the common ancestry of Polynesians and indigenous Taiwanese. Genetic t...

New research puts a fresh spin on current thinking of speech evolution in humans

A study, published today in the prestigious journal Nature by Dr. Michael Petrides and colleagues at the Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) at McGill University, challenges current thinking that speech developed as a result of new structures that evolved in the human brain. Dr. Petrides and colleagues have identified a distinct brain region that controls jaw movements in macaque monkeys that i...

California computer scientists double volume of data in NIH biotech repository

Faster computation of haplotypes provides insight into genetic basis of human diseaseHigh-throughput sequencing of an individual's DNA yields a map of genetic variation which can give clues to the genetic underpinning of human disease. The current technologies collect genotypes, or information from the individual's two chromosomes. Yet many scientists believe that drilling down to the variation...

Computer models aid understanding of antibody-dependent enhancement in spread of dengue fever

Evolutionary trade-off exists between advantage and disadvantage Some viruses' ability to exploit the human body's own defenses to increase their replication may be both a blessing and curse, according to the findings of a study conducted by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The process is known as antibody-dependent enhancement. Scientists believe antibo...

Largest computational biology simulation mimics life’s most essential nanomachine

With preliminary results from a study in Botswana, Harvard School of Public Health researchers have found that people with HIV-1 subtype C in resource-poor settings, who receive antiretroviral (ARV) therapy, can achieve comparable results to those in the developed world. A fully supported health care delivery system and infrastructure help ensure this success, according to data published in Novem...

'Computer-chemistry' yields new insight into a puzzle of cell division

Duke University biochemists aided by Duke computer scientists and computational chemists have identified the likely way two key enzymes dock in an intricate three-dimensional puzzle-fit to regulate cell division. Solving the docking puzzle could lead to anticancer drugs to block the runaway cell division behind some cancers, said the researchers. Significantly, their insights arose not ju...

New technique puts brain-imaging research on its head

It's a scene football fans will see over and over during the bowl and NFL playoff seasons: a player, often the quarterback, being slammed to the ground and hitting the back of his head on the landing. Sure, it hurts, but what happens to the inside of the skull? Researchers and doctors long have relied upon crude approximations made from test dummy crashes or mathematical models that infe...

Setting the standard for computer models of life

Biologists are making a concerted effort to catalogue all the molecular components of living things, from the smallest molecules and ions to the genetic code. These 'parts lists' help them to build computer models that simulate living processes. By combining models of simple processes they hope to understand and faithfully represent how entire biological systems - be they cells, organs, o...

Computers to save unique type of American red squirrel

UK expertise is being exported to North America to help prevent a unique type of red squirrel dying out in as little as 30 years time. Det...

Pleasing plant shapes explained by new computer model

Flowers are innately beautiful to the human eye, but how does a sunflower achieve its stunning disc of intersecting spirals or a daisy its delicate symmetry? That was the question tackled by University of Calgary computer scientists, who have answered one of biology's enduring questions with an animated model that provides the most detailed simulation of how plants grow into recognizable s...

Common practices at petting zoos put visitors at risk

While petting zoos pose a risk for gastrointestinal illness, most visitors aren't aware that simple prevention measures could prevent infection. In addition, some engage in behaviors that might increase their risk of infection according to several studies being presented this week at the International Conference on Emerging Infectious Diseases. Researchers from the CDC today release the r...

New brain hormone puts brakes on reproduction

University of California, Berkeley, researchers have discovered a new actor in the mammalian reproductive system, a hormone that fills a role long suspected, but until now undetected. The hormone, a small protein, or peptide, called gonadotropin-inhibitory hormone (GnIH), puts the brakes on reproduction by directly inhibiting the action of the central hormone of the reproductive system - g...

Georgia Tech accelerates drug discovery with new IBM supercomputing cluster

The Center will use IBM technologies to advance research into new drugs for the treatment of some of today's most life-threatening diseases, including cancer. The Center's research will be headed by one of the world's leading systems biologists, Dr. Jeffrey Skolnick, the Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Computational Systems Biology. Funded by $8.5 million in grants from the St...

Lack of basic research putting patients at risk

Patients are suffering because not enough basic clinical research is being done, warns a senior doctor in this week's BMJ. He believes that medical academia is failing patients and clinicians by neglecting this vital area of research. Basic observational research provides the information that doctors need to diagnose and treat patients appropriately, writes neurologist Professor Peter Roth...

Computer simulation hints at new HIV drug target

For more than a year, researchers watched patiently as a few computer-simulated HIV protease molecules squirmed into more than 15,000 slightly different shapes. In real time, this contortion takes only a fraction of a second. In the end, however, this suspended animation paid off, as the simulations uncovered a potential new drug target to fight drug-resistant AIDS. Howard Hughes Medical...

Computer scientist sorts out confusable drug names

Was that Xanex or Xanax? Or maybe Zantac? If you're a health care professional you'd better know the difference--mistakes can be fatal. An estimated 1.3 million people in the United States alone are injured each year from medication errors, and the U.S. Federal Drug Administration (FDA) has been working to reduce the possibilities of these errors, such as a documented case in which a patie...

Avian flu modeled on supercomputer, explores vaccine and isolation options for thwarting a pandemic

Using supercomputers to respond to a potential national health emergency, scientists have developed a simulation model that makes stark predictions about the possible future course of an avian influenza pandemic, given today's environment of worldwide connectivity. The research, by a team of scientists from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the University of Washington and the Fred Hu...

Epidemic of unneeded amputations

Non-traumatic amputations ?those caused by arterial blockages related to diabetes, smoking, obesity and vascular system complications ?are occurring at an alarming rate. Yet physicians may be too quick to amputate as 85 percent of them may be preventable, according to the International Diabetes Foundation. Amputations are not only disfiguring and life-threatening, but are more dangerous an...

Computational model simulates AZT metabolism in mitochondria

Researchers at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute (VBI) at Virginia Tech have developed a computational model that allows scientists to better understand the metabolism and toxicity of the HIV/AIDS drug zidovudine (azidothymidine, AZT). AZT is used successfully as part of Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Therapy (HAART) to control the level of the human immunodeficiency virus in HIV-infe...