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{bio,medical} informatics


Saturday, May 05, 2001

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find related articles. powered by google. BioMedNet Microarrays are the road ahead, but beware of potholes
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""A new era of mathematics and biology is overtaking us," Louis M. Staudt, senior investigator at the National Cancer Institute, declared during his opening remarks at the seminar, which was held at Rockefeller University. In clinical practice, microarrays could one day allow doctors to provide a genetic profile of a patient's tumor, leading to customized therapies to fight malignancy. Staudt's own research has uncovered different subtypes of lymphoma that could lead to different forms of treatment.

However, progress in the microarray field will require greater multidisciplinary work, speakers said. A senior investigator at the National Human Genome Institute, Paul Meltzer pointed out that bioinformaticists have difficulty understanding the needs of biologists, while biologists can rarely follow the complex math required to analyze the huge amount of data generated with microarrays."
redux [08.12.00]
find related articles. powered by google. GenomeBiology Whither genomics?
"The flood of data from genome-wide analysis is transforming biology. We need to develop new, interdisciplinary approaches to convert these data into information about the components and structures of individual biological pathways and to use the resulting information to yield knowledge about general principles that explain the functions and evolution of life."

"Genomics increases the chance that biology will experience a split like the one in physics, between those who collect and those who analyze data. This will challenge the majority of biologists who believe that modeling, simulation, and theory have little to contribute to biology. This prejudice rests on insecurity engendered by most biologists' weakness in mathematics (including my own) and previous efforts to model systems using more variables than there were data points. If we keep clinging to this prejudice, we will drown in a sea of data."

redux [07.13.00]
find related articles. powered by google. Nature Segmentation in silico
"A new mathematical biology is emerging. Building on experimental data from developing organisms, it uses the power of computational methods to explore the properties of real gene networks."

"Our understanding of gene networks is at an early stage. We perceive their complexity only after it has been filtered by the limitations of the techniques used to study them. Genome databases and DNA-chip technology, which enables huge numbers of genes to be screened for activity, will undoubtedly provide more, and much more complicated, data than anything produced by Drosophila genetics. If a relatively simple gene network such as the segment-polarity system is hard to understand intuitively, we can be certain that modelling will be essential to make sense of the flood of new data.

But this will not be elegant theoretical modelling: rather, it will be rooted in the arbitrary complexity of evolved organisms. The task will require a breed of biologist–mathematician as familiar with handling differential equations as with the limitations of messy experimental data. There will be plenty of vacancies, and, on present showing, not many qualified applicants."

redux [04.05.00]
find related articles. powered by google. HMS Beagle Are Computers Evolving in Biology?
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"I suspect that although the new enthusiasm for computers in biology is genuine, it overlooks some basic problems in implementation. The basic difficulty, as I see it, is that although biologists use computers, they do not trust everything that comes out of them. It is one thing to use them to print up nice-looking graphs, but it is an entirely different matter to use them to think better."

"Francis Crick was once quoted as saying that no biologist had ever made a discovery using a mathematical model. I would reply that no biologist has ever made a discovery by running an electrophoretic gel. They make discoveries by using their brains. Computers, like all scientific tools, are only as good as the person who uses them. If biologists don't understand how computer models are constructed, they won't know their strengths and limitations. Without some foundation of trust, biologists will be unlikely to utilize or accept this powerful method of data analysis."


[ rhetoric ]

Bioinformatics will be at the core of biology in the 21st century. In fields ranging from structural biology to genomics to biomedical imaging, ready access to data and analytical tools are fundamentally changing the way investigators in the life sciences conduct research and approach problems. Complex, computationally intensive biological problems are now being addressed and promise to significantly advance our understanding of biology and medicine. No biological discipline will be unaffected by these technological breakthroughs.

BIOINFORMATICS IN THE 21st CENTURY

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