Ever since the National Institutes of Health (NIH) began funding the National Centers for Biomedical Computing (NCBCs) just over seven years ago, these powerhouses have been plugging away, building the nation’s computational research infrastructure.  Now a collection of articles about the Centers has been published in the March 2012 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA).

During the one-hour drama that is human cell division, many genes enter and exit the stage. Until now, researchers did not know the identities of many of these actors, nor understand their various roles. Now, using a combination of high-throughput screening methods, time-resolved movies and a supervised machine-learning algorithm, researchers have identified 572 genes that are involved in mitosis in human cells. The raw data and images are available to the research community at www.mitocheck.org.

Peek inside the skull of a couch potato watching reruns on TV and you’ll see non-stop patterns of blood flow throughout the brain. If you learn to pick out which activity patterns match up with, say, a good belly laugh, then you might be on your way to reading the viewer’s internal experiences. Recently, experts from a variety of fields competed to glean subjective perceptions like humor from functional MRIs of TV viewers. They were surprisingly successful.

A blindside attack on HIV-1 protease might just combat drug-resistant strains of HIV, according to simulations run by researchers at the University of California, San Diego. When the simulations shut down an exposed movement on the side of the enzyme, the active site shut down as well. The work was published in Biopolymers in June 2006.

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When you accidentally twist a shoelace, garden hose, or necklace, it can get annoyingly tangled into intractable knots. On the microscopic level, biopolymers—string-like molecules such as DNA—also form knots, with one mysterious exception: knotted proteins are rare. Physicists have now used computational methods to quantify just how rare in the May 2006 issue of PLoS Computational Biology.

Implanting electrodes into paralyzed torso muscles can help individuals with spinal cord injury balance in their seats. So say researchers at Case Western Reserve University, who have built a three-dimensional biomechanical model that predicts how effectively functional electrical stimulation (FES) stabilizes seated postures.

Neurons are tough cells to study. There are a staggering number of them in most animals, and they are constantly talking with one another. One way to look at groups of neurons in real-time is to take a slice of brain, stimulate it electrically, and measure responses across the slice. Now a new tool may give researchers more neuronal data in the span of a few milliseconds than ever before.

In biology textbooks, the carefully rendered cross-section of an E. coli cell often resembles a well-organized and spacious apartment, with everything in its place and ample room for movement. But a recent computational recreation of the scene looks more like a Friday night dance floor, with molecules bumped up against one another in every direction.  In addition to providing a dramatic, qualitative description of the crowded cytoplasm, this first atomically detailed computational model of E.

These days, molecular biologists often gather data over a period of time—observing shifts as they occur inside groups of cells undergoing natural changes. The researchers then face the daunting task of making sense of it all. Now, computational biologists have devised a software program to easily visualize and analyze these mountains of time-series data in animated movie form.