computational biology – Quanta Magazine

How AI Revolutionized Protein Science, but Didn’t End It

Yasemin Saplakoglu — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 14:23:51 +0000

In December 2020, when pandemic lockdowns made in-person meetings impossible, hundreds of computational scientists gathered in front of their screens to watch a new era of science unfold. They were assembled for a conference, a friendly competition some of them had attended in person for almost three decades where they could all get together and obsess over the same question. Known as the protein...

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Most Complete Simulation of a Cell Probes Life’s Hidden Rules

Yasemin Saplakoglu — Thu, 24 Feb 2022 15:45:01 +0000

From the bizarre creatures in the depths of the oceans to the bacteria inside our bodies, all life on Earth consists of cells. But we have only a very rough idea of how even the simplest of those cells function. Now, as described recently in Cell, a team at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and their colleagues have created the most complete computer simulation ever of a living cell.

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Her Machine Learning Tools Pull Insights From Cell Images

Esther Landhuis — Tue, 02 Nov 2021 15:59:54 +0000

You can’t judge a book by its cover, or so we’re taught about people. For cells, however, that’s surprisingly less true. Using machine learning methods similar to those that enable computers to recognize faces, biologists can characterize individual cells in stacks of microscopy images. By measuring thousands of visualizable cellular properties — the distribution of a tagged protein...

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For Embryo’s Cells, Size Can Determine Fate

Jordana Cepelewicz — Mon, 12 Aug 2019 15:00:43 +0000

The developing embryo is a finely tuned machine. Its cells know what to do, and when to do it. They know to grow or shrink, to divide or lie dormant, to come together into a beating heart or hurtle through the bloodstream in search of a distant invader. And they know to do all that without a central command station or an objective map of their surroundings to guide them. Instead, cells are left to...

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How Nature Defies Math in Keeping Ecosystems Stable

Veronique Greenwood — Wed, 26 Sep 2018 17:00:07 +0000

Behind the beautiful facade of a rainforest, a savanna or a placid lake is a world teeming with contests and partnerships. Species are competing for space, consuming one another for resources, taking advantage of one another’s talents, and brokering trades of nutrients. But there’s something funny about this picture. When ecologists try to model ecosystems using math, they tend to find that the...

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