Understanding Molecular Kinetics with Markov State Models
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
Genetic Variants and Ill Health: Scanning 500,000 SNPs Yields Gene-Disease Connections

It's an exhilarating time for genome-wide association studies

For the past few months it seemed you couldn’t open a journal without reading results of a new genome-wide association study. The results kept pouring in: four studies in April showing seven...
Oct, 01, 2007
Taking on the Exposome

How bioinformatics tools are bringing insight to the environmental side of the health equation

When it comes to what kills people, Nurture trumps Nature: Chronic diseases with overwhelmingly environmental (rather than genetic) causes are responsible for the deaths of two-thirds of the world...
Exposome
Nov, 01, 2016
Unlocking the Genetics of Complex Diseases: GWAS and Beyond

Building upon the clues provided by GWAS to gain new insights

Some diseases, such as cystic fibrosis, have a beautiful simplicity: A genetic misspelling cripples a protein, which profoundly and predictably alters the body. Find the faulty gene for these so-...
Jan, 12, 2015
Automating Literature Surveillance
Today, if researchers want to study complex relationships among genes, diseases and drugs, they have to hope that human curators have read the scientific literature, extracted the relevant...
Apr, 01, 2016
Text Mining: How the BD2K Centers are Making Knowledge Accessible

State-of-the-art approaches are a boon to biomedicine

Relevant NIH Institutes:  NHGRI, NIBIB, NLM, and all disease-focused institutes including NCI, NHLBI, NIDDK, NINDS, NIAID, and NIAMS   Since the 1960s, biologists have manually curated...
Jun, 21, 2017
111 Reference Human Epigenomes Now Mapped

Different cell types intriguingly varied

Each cell in a person’s body contains the same three billion letter DNA encyclopedia. But the many different cell types throughout the body (brain, bone, heart, skin, etc.) represent different...
epigenetics
Jun, 01, 2015
Canonicity and Disease Ontologies
Ontologies provide biomedical researchers with an inventory of the universal features of reality across organisms, biomedical disciplines, and levels of granularity. In capturing what is universal,...
Jul, 01, 2009
Genomic Sequencing: Overcoming Challenges to a Bright Future
Whole genome sequencing (WGS) and whole exome sequencing (WES), which sequences only the protein-coding regions of the genome, have already begun to transform clinical medicine. They are being used...
Jun, 18, 2014
Network-based Approaches to Prediction of Disease Genes
The recent surge of high-throughput experimental data, such as gene expression microarrays, offers a profound opportunity to gain a more detailed understanding of the genes involved in the...
Jan, 01, 2009