{bio,medical} informatics
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Stanford Medical Informatics Preprint Archive
Knowledge-Based Bioterrorism Surveillance
"An epidemic resulting from an act of bioterrorism could be catastrophic. However, if an epidemic can be detected and characterized early on, prompt public health intervention may mitigate its impact. Current surveillance approaches do not perform well in terms of rapid epidemic detection or epidemic monitoring. One reason for this shortcoming is their failure to bring existing knowledge and data to bear on the problem in a coherent manner. Knowledge-based methods can integrate surveillance data and knowledge, and allow for careful evaluation of problem-solving methods. This paper presents an argument for knowledge-based surveillance, describes a prototype of BioSTORM, a system for real-time epidemic surveillance, and shows an initial evaluation of this system applied to a simulated epidemic from a bioterrorism attack."
redux [02.18.02]
"President George W. Bush, the National Homeland Defense Secretary, Tom Ridge, and Health and Human Services Secretary, Tommy Thompson visited the University of Pittsburgh (UP) yesterday to review one of the advanced developments in medical informatics - a collaboration of the University's Center for Biomedical Informatics and Carnegie Mellon University. The project, known as the Real-Time Outbreak and Disease Surveillance system (RODS), is an early warning system for outbreaks of disease designed to obtain and analyze existing sources of data in real time."
"The Real-time Outbreak and Disease Surveillance (RODS) system is a prototype public health surveillance system. RODS collects and analyzes relevant data automatically and in real-time, including emergency room registration data, microbiology culture results, reports of radiographs, and laboratory orders. RODS provides tools that (1) help detect the presence of a disease outbreak, and (2) support the characterization of that outbreak by a public health official. These tools include case definitions, automatic detection algorithms that can be attached to specific data streams, and data analytic tools that support temporal and spatial data analysis and visualization."
redux [06.29.01]
"The merits of linking two fields seemingly as disparate as geographic information systems (GIS) and bioinformatics might not seem obvious, but Virginia Tech's recent symposium linking the twoaeand its roster of renowned participants from both fieldsaehas raised expectations "Applications of GIS to Bioinformatics" was the first major public forum to cross-pollinate the disciplines, helping to fortify a relatively new, yet highly promising investigative area."
""As a result of new dialog between the fields, as we've had at this conference, we are gaining an important mechanistic link between individual-level processes tracked by genomics and proteomics and population-level outcomes tracked by GIS and epidemiology. This will allow us to do a far better job of monitoring, quantifying, and predicting human-health consequences associated with the environment. The potential payoff in related fields such as those looking at climate change, emerging and resurgent infectious diseases, and environmental health is enormous.""
"The meeting brings together researchers in two of the most dynamic analytical technologies-GIS and bioinformatics. The value of GIS analytical systems and data structures to bioinformatics are only now being recognized. Similarly, the methodologies used in bioinformatics can inform GIS scholars of new approaches to pattern recognition and analysis. The purpose of the symposium is to explore the potentials for using GIS as an analytical methodology in bioinformatics and to understand the opportunities bioinformatics presents to the GIS research community. The symposium, the first to focus on the interface between these two research areas, will afford scholars the opportunity to establish new research directions in both fields of investigation."
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The New York Times
Gene-Mappers Take New Aim at Diseases
[requires 'free' registration]
"A $100 million project to develop a new kind of map of the human genome was announced today by an international consortium. Its goal is to hasten discovery of the variant genes thought to underlie common human diseases like diabetes, asthma and cancer.
The consortium includes government agencies from Japan, China and Canada, and a medical charity, the Wellcome Trust of London. Its largest contributor, from the United States, is the National Institutes of Health, which is investing $39 million over the project's three years."
"Hap-map backers, most prominently the National Human Genome Research Institute's Francis Collins, say this effort to identify common patterns of SNPs will catapult research in complex genetic diseases and drug responses into a new and much more sophisticated era. By eliminating the need to scan whole segments of the genome for individual genetic variations, the map will provide a shortcut in the process of linking SNPs to disease.
But the hap map also has critics who charge that this large-scale project is a poor use of resources. Geneticists have not been able to prove that complex diseases are caused by common mutations, they point out, so the hap map may prove to be only marginally useful in clinical work. Some who are more hostile to the project assert the hap map is merely a cynical effort to keep federal research dollars flowing into the country's big sequencing centers."
redux [07.23.01]
[requires 'free' registration]
"A haplotype is defined as the genetic constitution of a person with respect to one member of a pair of genes. Small differences in genes are known as single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). Researchers analyzed 313 genes in 82 individuals with different ancestral backgrounds. They found that "the strength of the genetic association of pairs of SNPs (linkage disequilibrium), which is important in the identification of disease-related genes, could not be readily predicted from examining individual genes or genomic regions." It appears that haplotypes provide more information as genetic markers in a gene than do SNPs.
Reference: Stephens, J.C., Schneider, J.A., Tanguay, D.A. et al. 2001. Haplotype variation and linkage disequilibrium in 313 human genes. Science 293(5529):489-493."
"Until recently, scientists had hoped to predict a person's response to medicines and find disease-causing genes by analyzing specific gene variations, called single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs. But the vast number of SNPs in the human genome would make this costly and laborious.
But new research indicates that SNPs actually travel together from one generation to the next in strands called haplotypes, Collins says.
Creating a haplotype map, he says, would greatly simplify the process of analyzing an individual's risk of disease and response to certain drugs. "The whole Human Genome Project has been a prelude to this," says Eric Lander of MIT, a leader of the publicly funded project."
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Apple: Pro/Science
Performing Feats of Bioinfomagic
"Dr. Will Gilbert likes to carry the human genome around on his iPod. It's the easiest way, he says, to transfer the genome -- 3 billion chemical "letters" that make up a person's genetic code, or DNA -- to the computers of other researchers at the Hubbard Center for Genome Studies at the University of New Hampshire.
Gilbert had set up a research project involving the human genome on his Power Mac, using the Apple/Genentech version of BLAST. A breakthrough implementation of the popular bioinformatics tool from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), A/G BLAST conducts high-speed DNA searches in biomedical research and drug discovery. "But," says Gilbert, "I wanted to run the project down the hall on another Mac. Rather than copy it across the network, I'd pull out my iPod. Plug it in, drag, drop, zip, boom, bang and walk it down the hall.""
redux [08.20.02]
"High-powered computers are the "tech" in biotechnology. So it's no surprise that Cambridge-based biotech giant Genzyme Corp. uses lots of muscular workstation machines, most of them running the sophisticated Unix operating system.
But what is surprising is that some of these powerful Unix boxes bear the trademark of Apple Computer Inc. They're Macintoshes -- the same user-friendly computers that have earned Apple a loyal following among artists, publishers, and home computer users."
redux [07.01.02]
"Apple Computer has become the first member of a program launched by open-source advocacy-group Bioinformatics.org that aims at linking open-source developers with bioinformatics hardware and software vendors.
Apple's new Co-Lab program hopes to nurture industry involvement either by co-locating software projects at its SourceForge-based Open Lab project or by hosting and sharing those projects with developers at vendor sites via the web, according to Bioinformatics.org president and founder Jeff Bizarro."
redux [05.19.02]
"Platform Computing plans to make its flagship Platform LSF software available for Apple's new Xserve, extending support for Mac OS X and Apple's new server, storage and systems management offerings.
"The combination of the Mac Xserve with Platform Computing's technology will enhance the quality and speed of work for Mac applications in life sciences, education and business," Ron Okamoto, Apple's vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations, said in a statement."
" Genentech -- Guy Kraines, vice president, Corporate IT. We got to use them, and we've got some observations. First, this is not a desktop box with rack-mount ears. From the physical design, the hot-swap capabilities, the remote monitoring -- this is a data center box. My guys in the data center are fully accepting of it. They did it right, right down to cable management. Second, performance. The G4 itself is a heck of a processor, especially with what we do. Velocity Engine doesn't just do Photoshop rendering well -- it does matching of genetic code really well too. The single most common application in bioinformatics is Blast. I'm not going to give you numbers today in terms of what we've done, but let's just say that this is not just a measurable improvement, but a meaningful improvement in helping us do what we need to do."
redux [12.16.01]
"Scientists are porting bioinformatics tools to the Macintosh platform because often they are already Macintosh users, and they want the convenience of being able to perform their research on their primary desktop computers. Traditionally scientific researchers have needed a desktop computer for all of their productivity applications, and a separate platform for the compute engine to support their research. "The tremendous benefit of Mac OS X is it gives you both," says Van Etten. "The only thing that comes close is Linux, but for most bioinformaticists, the Linux desktop user experience is a little sophisticated.""
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Salon
Data-mining life on earth
"But putting a stake into the earth -- teaming with microscopic organisms -- and declaring that you're going to catalog all known life isn't as simple as getting a bunch of databases to talk to each other.
"This is much less a technological challenge than a social challenge," says Ann Davis, the executive director of CalFlora, who has collected more than 200,000 observations about plants in the site's database. Getting scientists and even laypersons to centralize their field research means, paradoxically, inspiring them to give up their control over their own data. Sharing an observation about an invasive artichoke thistle amounts to giving that information away."
redux [07.02.01]
"Earlier this month, 18 nations agreed to establish the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) in Copenhagen, which will establish a standard method for data exchange about such specimens for researchers in different countries. By developing a kind of online phone book of the world's major plant and animal collections, the potential for new scientific discoveries could be huge."
"But the big task right now is just getting the stuff online. As a database project, it could make the Human Genome Project look simple by comparison."
""Man has been collecting biological data for centuries," said Dr. John Curran, assistant chief of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization's division of Entomology (aka insects). "The genome people had the advantage in that they started collecting and working with their data after computers existed.""
redux [10.01.00]
"It is not surprising that information about biodiversity forms the basis of one of our most important knowledge domains, vital to a wide range of scientific, educational, commercial, and government uses. Unfortunately, most biodiversity information now exists in forms that are not easily accessed or used. From traditional paper-based libraries to scattered databases of varying size and physical specimens preserved in natural-history collections throughout the world, our record of biodiversity is uncoordinated and poorly integrated, and large parts of it are isolated from general use. We lack the technologies needed to effectively gather, analyze, and synthesize these data into new discoveries. As a result, this information is not being used as effectively as it could by scientists, resource managers, policy-makers, or other potential client communities. The good news is that research activities are being conducted around the world that could improve our ability to manage biodiversity information, and the emerging field of biodiversity informatics is attempting to meet the challenges posed by this domain."
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The Third Culture
GENOMIC IMPRINTING : A TALK WITH DAVID HAIG
"The area to which I've given the greatest attention is a new phenomenon in molecular biology called genomic imprinting, which is a situation in which a DNA sequence can have conditional behavior depending on whether it is maternally inherited--coming from an egg--or paternally inherited--coming through a sperm. The phenomenon is called imprinting because the basic idea is that there is some imprint that is put on the DNA in the mother's ovary or in the father's testes which marks that DNA as being maternal or paternal, and influences its pattern of expression--what the gene does in the next generation in both male and female offspring."
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IBM developerWorks
Open source in the lab
"Science and engineering laboratories have long depended on proprietary products for daily data analysis chores. Now, many labs are turning to open source products and development languages for specific technical benefits the conventional products don't give them.
"Harrington is "eager for the day when we can dump the overpriced and underfeatured languages we use" and switch to open source alternatives, and so are a growing number of researchers. But it's more than that. While proprietary products aimed at scientists and engineers provide a great deal of value, they do so at high cost -- not just the purchase price, but also the costs of inflexibility, stubbornly slow performance, and difficult development. Many users are already making the switch. The result: they're improving their work right now."
redux [02.01.02]
"First, Ewan argued that open source makes sense because it follows good and well-known scientific principles."
"Second, Ewan emphasized that in biological research it's not the software that's important--it's the data. Since the actual data matters much more than the tools used to process it, there's a big benefit in sharing software."
"The third reason Ewan gave for supporting open source was that molecular biology and medicine will be most advanced by the creation of a common infrastructure--and this is something best done with open source tools."
"In the face of the mounting discussion around this topic, the Open Bioinformatics Foundation - the non-profit umbrella group that supports BioPerl, BioPython, BioJava, BioDAS and other projects -- released a position statement at today's panel discussion. According to OBF board member Steven Brenner of the University of California, Berkeley, the statement was necessary to distinguish the OBF from organizations "with similar sounding names" and "because everybody was asking us where we stood on the topic."
The OBF statement takes a more moderate stance than the openinformatics.org petition. Noting that "scientific software developed with public support should be distributed under terms analogous to those applied to biological materials," it concludes, "We encourage institutions to delegate to their scientists the opportunity to select non-restrictive and open source licenses for their software.""
redux [01.16.01]
"A debate is heating up in the academic community over whether software that is generated by publicly funded research must be released with an open source license. The Internet is one example of how releasing research code benefited the public, but the trend seems to be changing now, and universities are more likely to consider the profit opportunity. The Bayh-Dole Act paved the way for the privatization of publicly funded resources, but not everyone is happy with the results.
Against the tide of privatization comes a group of bioinformatics researchers and programmers with an online petition to require that all software created by publicly funded research projects be licensed as open source. They have founded a group and a Web site, OpenInformatics.org, to further this cause.
Here we present two opposing viewpoints on this issue."
redux [01.07.01]
"The Open Source movement is infectious, it seems. It has bubbled up in the field of bioinformatics - gene research software. Gene research is already a burgeoning area of activity, which is predicted to deliver numerous benefits to the health industry. It is also an area where software counts and where universities have managed to prosper from their activities. US universities lodge about 2000 patents each year, many in bioinformatics, and these patents contribute a good deal of revenue - an amount estimated at about $5 billion per annum, or ten percent of their total budgets. Thus Open Source activities in this area are not universally welcomed."
"Over the past several years, open-source software development has won high-profile adherents in the business world -- including the likes of IBM and Sun Microsystems. But it has always had its strongest fans in the academic world, where open-source software is seen as a natural extension of the idea that the fruits of academic research should be shared with everyone.
But now some academic programmers on the cutting edge have found that the licensing office is proving a more formidable obstacle to progress than the limits of their imagination and skill."
redux [11.26.01]
"Before computer whiz Steven E. Brenner accepted his tenure-track research post at the University of California-Berkeley last year, he demanded that the school's intellectual property police leave him alone.
Brenner prevailed. He's now one of the few experts in the emerging field of bioinformatics with the freedom to distribute his work, software used in gene research.
``It's vital to what we do,'' says Brenner, who supports a movement to force universities to allow ``open source'' publishing of gene research software code."
redux [08.18.01]
"Steve Brenner, assistant professor and leader of a computational genomics research group at the University of California, Berkeley, said he fears that many academic bioinformaticists are unaware of a legal risk they face on a daily basis: contributing to open source software projects without explicit permission from their institutions.
While many employers have clauses in their employment contracts that restrict the creation and use of open source software, bioinformatics programmers at universities are often not as attuned to copyright issues as their industry counterparts. This fact, Brenner said, raises the possibility that a good portion of biological open source software is currently being produced illegally."
"The issue seems to be coming to a head in the academic world now, as more universities are exploiting the revenue stream made possible by their copyright and patent holdings. ?If you?re a software developer, the university holds rights to your software, but if you?re an English professor or Law professor and publish a book, they?re not the least bit interested in copyright,? said Thomas Field, an attorney at the Franklin Pierce Law Center affiliated with the Association of University Technology Managers."
redux [11.05.01]
"Computers are supposed to help biotechnology, right? Isn't bioinformatics all the rage right now? Well, it is, but with popularity comes legal questions that many companies don't address until it's too late."
"It seems that many biotech companies don't realize that a computer vendor may have the rights to the software, and ultimately, the work that the biotech companies do.
For example, if a biotech company orders a computer network to help it sequence the genome of yeast, the company may ask the vendor to customize the software it will use to do the sequencing. However, the question is, who owns the right to that customized software--the biotech company or the software programmer?"
redux [08.23.01]
"This report outlines recent activity in open source software development within the discipline of bioinformatics. I present the relevant highlights of two bioinformatics meetings held in July 2001 in Copenhagen, Denmark: the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference and the Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology Conference. The report also describes a large number of projects and groups important to bioinformatics open source software development. The appendices include meeting programs, the currently accepted definition of open source software, and descriptions of important online biological data sources."
redux [07.27.00]
"Good software forms seamless connections; as George Orwell said of prose, the best is like a window pane: transparent. The obscurity of commercial binaries is an obstacle to good quality communication between systems. In healthcare, good communication is too important to remain proprietary. Software developers should remain confident that there will always be work for the future in discovering, providing, and adapting applications for organizations, and training people to use them. This, rather than the sharp-suited gouging of Bill Gates wannabees, should become the predominant business model for software in the British NHS. Software engineering will become a profession more like medicine and the law: in which practitioners earn a fair hourly reward for their experience at interpreting, evaluating and applying knowledge from a specialized domain to the benefit of their clients. Current models, which restrict the sharing and development of knowledge, are certainly counterproductive and arguably unethical. Open source is the future: all we have to do is built it."
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News.Com
It's Linux for IBM supercomputer project
"Linux will be the main operating system for IBM's upcoming family of "Blue Gene" supercomputers--a major endorsement for the OS and the open-source computing model it represents."
""We had two choices of operating systems for the Blue Gene family, either use a special purpose system or Linux," Bill Pulleyblank, director of Exploratory Server Systems at IBM Research, said in a statement. "We chose Linux because it's open and because we believed it could be extended to run a computer the size of Blue Gene. We saw considerable advantage in using an operating system supported by the open-source community so that we can get their input and feedback.""
redux [07.13.01]
""Ambuj Goyal, IBM Research's general manager for software, solutions, and strategy, was more ambitious than that. Why not build a machine to model molecular dynamics using general-purpose chips rather than specialized ones? That way you'd produce a prototype for a whole new family of supercomputers. Not only would it be great technology development, it would be great marketing, too. Whereas the Department of Energy has the greatest interest in top-end supercomputing - with its need to understand how nuclear weapons work - focusing on the life sciences rather than the death sciences could make supercomputing more widely appealing. What's more, a biology program would be a way of telling one of the newest markets for big iron - the post-genome biotech world - that IBM took its interests seriously. "We believe that the life sciences are going to be a rapidly growing area," says Blue Gene project manager Bill Pulleyblank, "a huge growth area for IBM.""
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News.Com
Stanford gives distributed computing an A
"Scientists at Stanford University have demonstrated tangible proof that scientific experiments can be conducted using thousands of low-end PCs wrangled together into loosely linked networks.
A group of chemists, including Stanford assistant professor Vijay Pande, said they successfully predicted the folding rate of a protein using calculations worked out on a so-called distributed computing network. Their research, conducted last year, was published this week in the science journal Nature."
redux [08.30.02]
"A research team at the San Diego Supercomputer Center is using a grid-based computer system from Entropia to build a set of protein structure databases."
"With the help of 250 desktop computers with processing power ranging from 180 MHz to 2.2 GHz, the platform has so far completed calculations on almost 1,000 proteins, said Elbert."
""What they've done in principle they could have done on one of their supercomputers, but those machines are heavily used for other projects," he said. "This is a way of expanding capacity. And it's a whole lot cheaper.""
redux [11.28.01]
"IBM will supply the University of Pennsylvania and four hospitals with computers that will link into a computing "grid" to check for breast cancer, the company will announce Wednesday.
The grid will be used to detect breast cancer in patients, store mammograms in digital form and identify populations that are particularly susceptible, the company said in a statement. The system can be used, for example, to compare a new mammogram to a previous year's image to detect changes.
IBM, along with rivals such as Sun Microsystems and Compaq Computer, have been backing grid computing, which joins computers and storage systems into a large pool of computing power.
redux [11.21.01]
"The US National Science Foundation has announced a $12 million programme - called the NSF Middleware Initiative (NMI) - to develop middleware: software that allows scientists to share applications, scientific instruments and data, and collaborate with their colleagues across high-performance networks.
The effort will build on the success of the Globus project in developing middleware tools for grid computing, and will integrate Globus and other emerging middleware components into a well-tested, comprehensive, commercial-quality, middleware distribution package that runs on multiple platforms. These middleware distributions will be disseminated to research labs and universities worldwide."
redux [11.12.01]
"Platform Computing, a company that tries to harness the collective computing power on computer networks, has signed a deal to commercialize an open-source supercomputing project.
Platform is working with the Globus Project to commercialize the Globus Toolkit for governing the use of computers and storage systems joined into a large computing "grid," Platform said Wednesday."
"Grid computing, though, often uses higher-powered computers than mere desktop PCs, and has attracted the interest of IBM, which thinks corporate customers as well as academics will use grid methods. IBM is working with Globus to boost this expansion.
Grid computing has long held potential for some types of computing tasks--typically those that don't require as much communication between one computing task and another. For this reason, they don't replace single mammoth supercomputers such as those from Cray. However, grid computing is popular among pharmaceutical companies and others."
"Computational Grids are emerging as a popular paradigm for solving large-scale compute and data intensive problems in science, engineering, and commerce. However, application composition, resource management and scheduling in these environments is a complex undertaking. In this paper, we illustrate the creation of a virtual laboratory environment by leveraging existing Grid technologies to enable molecular modeling for drug design on distributed resources. It involves screening millions of molecules of chemical compounds against a protein target, chemical database (CDB) to identify those with potential use for drug design. We have grid-enabled the molecular docking process by composing it as a parameter sweep application using the Nimrod-G tools. We then developed new tools for remote access to molecules in CDB small molecule database. The Nimrod-G resource broker along with molecule CDB data broker is used for scheduling and on-demand processing of jobs on distributed grid resources. The results demonstrate the ease of use and suitability of the Nimrod-G and virtual laboratory tools."
redux [04.04.01]
[requires 'free' registration]
"Intel is providing equipment and software downloads for a project in which volunteers are donating spare home computer cycles to a Stanford University project studying the protein-folding process. The project, Folding@Home, was the first to model successfully a complete protein fold - a task not even achieved by supercomputers."
""We want to increase the value of the PC," said Scott Griffin, Intel's program manager. "The PC is there when people aren't at it, like when they are in meetings. A great thing about this is you get every day users involved in research that they care about. Not only do they get to help out, but they get to help cure these terrible diseases.""
redux [09.23.01]
"IBM is spending $100 million building the world's fastest supercomputer to do cutting-edge medical research, but a distributed computing effort running on ordinary PCs may have beaten Big Blue to the punch.
IBM's proposed Blue Gene , a massively parallel supercomputer, in hopes to help diagnose and treat disease by simulating the ultra-complex process of protein folding.
"But Folding@Home , a modest distributed computing project run by Dr. Vijay Pande and a group of graduate students at Stanford University, has already managed to simulate how proteins self-assemble, something that computers, until now, have not been able to do."
redux [10.09.00]
"The SETI@Home problem can be thought of as a special case of the distributed computation verification problem: "given a large amount of computation divided among many computers, how can malicious participating computers be prevented from doing damage?" This is not a new problem. Distributed computation is a venerable research topic, and the idea of "selling spare CPU cycles" has been a science fiction fixture for years."
"The Internet makes it possible for computation to be distributed to many more machines. However, distributing computing around the internet requires developers to consider the possibility of malicious clients."
"The general study of secure multiparty computation has produced much interesting work over the last two decades. Less well studied, unfortunately, are the tools and techniques required to move the theoretical results to the real world. The old dream of massively distributed computations is finally coming true, and yet our tools for building and analysing real systems still seem primitive. The challenge of the next few years will be to bridge this gap."
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BioMedNet
Third time's the charm for rhesus macaque
[requires 'free' registration]
"After twice languishing at moderate-priority status, the macaque may finally become a top candidate on the list of genomes to be sequenced, leading geneticists predict. In the third round of proposals for candidate genomes, the deadline for which was last week, geneticist George Weinstock submitted a revised white paper for the macaque, which he hopes will more clearly articulate the high priority of its sequence."
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The O'Reilly Network
Beginning Python for Bioinformatics
"Bioinformatics, the use of computers in biological research, is the newest wrinkle on one of the oldest pursuits--trying to uncover the secret of life. While we may not know all of life's secrets, at the very least computers are helping us understand many of the biological processes that take place inside of living things. In fact, the use of computers in biological research has risen to such a degree that computer programming has now become an important and almost essential skill for today's biologists.
The purpose of this article is to introduce Python as a useful and viable development language for the computer programming needs of the bioinformatics community. In this introduction, we'll identify some of the advantages of using Python for bioinformatics. Then we'll create and demonstrate examples of working code to get you started."
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BioMedNet
Gene hunters lose control without whole cells
[requires 'free' registration]
"We may have the human genome sequence, but many important genes are being misclassified or missed altogether because they lie hundreds of kilobases remote from the coding regions they control, speakers agreed today during an overflow session at the American Society of Human Genetics meeting here."
"Control elements could be hiding almost anywhere on the same chromosome as the gene they regulate. What's more, researchers said, it may prove impossible to validate their effects within the human genome, unless DNA banks begin to store and cultivate the corresponding cell lines."
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Genomeweb
Craig Venter Goes Shopping for Bioinformatics to Fill His New
Sequencing Center
"But Venter has hinted at the characteristics he'd like his IT platform to have. For on thing, he said he'd be interested in IT that "doesn't require the massive air conditioning. The room at Celera cost $6 million before you put the computer in. That makes it pretty expensive," said Venter, whose new center and newly opened research facilities aim at making gene sequencing more affordable and practical. "If for any hospital to interpret the genetic code of their patients they need $100 million computer, this is not a revolution that will go very far."
Consequently, he said he's been "looking at these new green machines being considered at the DOE that have lower energy requirements" and therefore produce less heat. "We're looking at ambient temperatures, massively parallel processors. We're trying to come up with almost the opposite of what we did at Celera: simple, cheap replicable supercomputing."
redux [07.22.02]
"For years, small biotech companies have used Linux to manage a lot of data on the cheap. Now that looks like a big business opportunity."
""Linux is an interesting dynamic," says Jeffrey Augen, director of life sciences strategy at IBM. "Most of the small biotech companies in the world today are standardizing on Linux platforms and Linux clusters. Small companies, even startup, round-A companies, are coming to us seeking a level of computer horsepower that traditionally you would see in larger companies.""
redux [06.25.02]
"The final version, which could be useful in protein-interaction studies, will include 1,400 next-generation Intel Itanium processors with an expected peak performance of 9.1 teraflops. It will cost $24.5 million and exceed by more than 30 times the speed of PNNL's old supercomputer, which was state of the art when it was installed in 1997."
"According to HP, the system, scheduled to begin delivery in the fall and go fully on-line next spring, will be the world's most powerful Linux-based system."
[requires 'free' registration]
"Though Q will be almost 200 times as fast, it will cost 640 times as much -- $215 million, compared with $335,000 for Green Destiny. And that does not count housing expenses -- the $93 million Metropolis center that provides the temperature-controlled, dust-free environment Q demands."
" Green Destiny belongs to a class of makeshift supercomputers called Beowulf clusters."
redux [07.13.01]
"Our solution was to construct a computing cluster using obsolete PCs that ORNL would have otherwise discarded. Dubbed the Stone SouperComputer because it was built essentially at no cost, our cluster of PCs was powerful enough to produce ecoregion maps of unprecedented detail. Other research groups have devised even more capable clusters that rival the performance of the world's best supercomputers at a mere fraction of their cost. This advantageous price-to-performance ratio has already attracted the attention of some corporations, which plan to use the clusters for such complex tasks as deciphering the human genome. In fact, the cluster concept promises to revolutionize the computing field by offering tremendous processing power to any research group, school or business that wants it."
"Above all, the Beowulf concept is an empowering force. It wrests high-level computing away from the privileged few and makes low-cost parallel-processing systems available to those with modest resources. Research groups, high schools, colleges or small businesses can build or buy their own Beowulf clusters, realizing the promise of a supercomputer in every basement. Should you decide to join the parallel-processing proletariat, please contact us through our Web site (http://extremelinux.esd.ornl.gov/) and tell us about your Beowulf-building experiences."
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New Scientist
Race for the $1000 genome is on
""We are proposing to give people their own sequence if they'll have it," says genomicist George Church of Harvard Medical School."
"Church and other experts think this is no longer a pipe dream. They believe that in less than a decade, people will be able to get their own genomes sequenced for about the price of a laptop or a flat-screen TV. When that happens, the thinking goes, a whole new industry of personal genomics will take off."
"But we're asking the philanthropic community to say, 'How about funding 100 genomes for patients with these diseases? Diseases that you care about or ethnogeographic groups to make sure there's sufficient diversity in the population or in some cases you yourself or your family as part of a legacy,' and everybody would have their data be part of a database that would be used for genome analysis in comparing clinical records, genotype/phenotype correlations, obviously in an anonymous fashion."
"It was misrepresented the first time in the press that this was the millionaires' genome project. Hopefully, it would not just be millionaires' genomes, although I think that would be an interesting study. I think we would find them to be remarkably similar to all the other genomes, but I think what we'd expect to happen is that there would be groups that support diseases that they really care about getting solved that they know are not going to get solved with the current paradigm..."
redux [10.03.02]
"Mapping and reading J. Craig Venter's genome took 15 years, $5 billion and some of the world's most sophisticated computers.
Wouldn't you, too, like your genome decoded?
Venter says he plans to offer the service, with the goal of burning individual human's entire DNA sequences onto shiny compact discs."
"Tonight's plenary panel discussion at GSAC, "The Future of DNA Sequencing: Advancing Toward the $1,000 Genome," hosted by Craig Venter and Gerald Rubin, quickly turned into a genomics version of the game show "The Price is Right."
"I had to do a little better than the thousand-dollar genome," said VisiGen Biotechnologies CEO Susan Hardin, one of the panelists, about her company's efforts to develop a single-molecule sequencing method using both a modified polymerase and nucleotides. "So we're going for the $995 genome.""
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Wired News
Tackling Breast Cancer on a Grid
"A centuries-old university is using the latest technology to combat breast cancer.
Oxford University's eDiamond grid computing project will pool and distribute information on breast cancer treatment, enable early screening and diagnosis, and provide medical professionals with tools and information to treat the disease.
Oxford researchers called it eDiamond because, like a cut gemstone, the project is multifaceted and is intended to help patients and doctors on a daily basis as well as advance medical research."
redux [09.13.02]
"A final obstacle that Stuart pointed out is of the self-inflicted variety: Grid, distributed, peer-to-peer, and other similar incarnations have become victims of their own hype. Increasing media coverage of these technologies has led to confusion in the marketplace, Stuart posited, "and when a prospect becomes confused, the easiest thing is not to do anything.""
"However, he added, there is a bright side to the publicity deluge. Citing the Gartner Group's annual "Hype Cycle of Emerging Technologies" report, which tracks new methods from the initial "tech trigger" period through the "peak of inflated expectations," the "trough of disillusionment," the "slope of enlightenment," and onto the final "plateau of productivity," Stuart noted that desktop grid computing might be working its way from the trough to the slope phase right now, largely because users are discovering which applications work best with the architecture."
redux [08.30.02]
"A research team at the San Diego Supercomputer Center is using a grid-based computer system from Entropia to build a set of protein structure databases."
"With the help of 250 desktop computers with processing power ranging from 180 MHz to 2.2 GHz, the platform has so far completed calculations on almost 1,000 proteins, said Elbert."
""What they've done in principle they could have done on one of their supercomputers, but those machines are heavily used for other projects," he said. "This is a way of expanding capacity. And it's a whole lot cheaper.""
redux [11.28.01]
"IBM will supply the University of Pennsylvania and four hospitals with computers that will link into a computing "grid" to check for breast cancer, the company will announce Wednesday.
The grid will be used to detect breast cancer in patients, store mammograms in digital form and identify populations that are particularly susceptible, the company said in a statement. The system can be used, for example, to compare a new mammogram to a previous year's image to detect changes.
IBM, along with rivals such as Sun Microsystems and Compaq Computer, have been backing grid computing, which joins computers and storage systems into a large pool of computing power.
redux [11.21.01]
"The US National Science Foundation has announced a $12 million programme - called the NSF Middleware Initiative (NMI) - to develop middleware: software that allows scientists to share applications, scientific instruments and data, and collaborate with their colleagues across high-performance networks.
The effort will build on the success of the Globus project in developing middleware tools for grid computing, and will integrate Globus and other emerging middleware components into a well-tested, comprehensive, commercial-quality, middleware distribution package that runs on multiple platforms. These middleware distributions will be disseminated to research labs and universities worldwide."
redux [11.12.01]
"Platform Computing, a company that tries to harness the collective computing power on computer networks, has signed a deal to commercialize an open-source supercomputing project.
Platform is working with the Globus Project to commercialize the Globus Toolkit for governing the use of computers and storage systems joined into a large computing "grid," Platform said Wednesday."
"Grid computing, though, often uses higher-powered computers than mere desktop PCs, and has attracted the interest of IBM, which thinks corporate customers as well as academics will use grid methods. IBM is working with Globus to boost this expansion.
Grid computing has long held potential for some types of computing tasks--typically those that don't require as much communication between one computing task and another. For this reason, they don't replace single mammoth supercomputers such as those from Cray. However, grid computing is popular among pharmaceutical companies and others."
"Computational Grids are emerging as a popular paradigm for solving large-scale compute and data intensive problems in science, engineering, and commerce. However, application composition, resource management and scheduling in these environments is a complex undertaking. In this paper, we illustrate the creation of a virtual laboratory environment by leveraging existing Grid technologies to enable molecular modeling for drug design on distributed resources. It involves screening millions of molecules of chemical compounds against a protein target, chemical database (CDB) to identify those with potential use for drug design. We have grid-enabled the molecular docking process by composing it as a parameter sweep application using the Nimrod-G tools. We then developed new tools for remote access to molecules in CDB small molecule database. The Nimrod-G resource broker along with molecule CDB data broker is used for scheduling and on-demand processing of jobs on distributed grid resources. The results demonstrate the ease of use and suitability of the Nimrod-G and virtual laboratory tools."
redux [04.04.01]
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"Intel is providing equipment and software downloads for a project in which volunteers are donating spare home computer cycles to a Stanford University project studying the protein-folding process. The project, Folding@Home, was the first to model successfully a complete protein fold - a task not even achieved by supercomputers."
""We want to increase the value of the PC," said Scott Griffin, Intel's program manager. "The PC is there when people aren't at it, like when they are in meetings. A great thing about this is you get every day users involved in research that they care about. Not only do they get to help out, but they get to help cure these terrible diseases.""
redux [09.23.01]
"IBM is spending $100 million building the world's fastest supercomputer to do cutting-edge medical research, but a distributed computing effort running on ordinary PCs may have beaten Big Blue to the punch.
IBM's proposed Blue Gene , a massively parallel supercomputer, in hopes to help diagnose and treat disease by simulating the ultra-complex process of protein folding.
"But Folding@Home , a modest distributed computing project run by Dr. Vijay Pande and a group of graduate students at Stanford University, has already managed to simulate how proteins self-assemble, something that computers, until now, have not been able to do."
redux [10.09.00]
"The SETI@Home problem can be thought of as a special case of the distributed computation verification problem: "given a large amount of computation divided among many computers, how can malicious participating computers be prevented from doing damage?" This is not a new problem. Distributed computation is a venerable research topic, and the idea of "selling spare CPU cycles" has been a science fiction fixture for years."
"The Internet makes it possible for computation to be distributed to many more machines. However, distributing computing around the internet requires developers to consider the possibility of malicious clients."
"The general study of secure multiparty computation has produced much interesting work over the last two decades. Less well studied, unfortunately, are the tools and techniques required to move the theoretical results to the real world. The old dream of massively distributed computations is finally coming true, and yet our tools for building and analysing real systems still seem primitive. The challenge of the next few years will be to bridge this gap."
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The New York Times
Nobel in Chemistry Goes to 3 Whose Work Speeded Drugs
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"Three scientists share this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing techniques to identify and map proteins, carbohydrates, DNA and other large biological molecules.
The techniques have sped the development of drugs and could lead to quicker diagnosis of cancer. They helped create a new field of biology, proteomics, in which scientists are trying to catalog the interplay of hundreds of thousands of proteins in human cells."
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The Seattle Times
Seattle nonprofit lands $19.8 million for protein research
"The Institute for Systems Biology, a Seattle nonprofit research center led by gene-sequencing pioneer Dr. Leroy Hood, said yesterday it has landed a $19.8 million contract from the National Institutes of Health to advance understanding of proteomics, the study of how proteins interact in the body."
In the wake of recent breakthroughs unraveling the human genetic code, proteomics is increasingly being viewed by scientists as the next step. Scientists say genes provide the instructions for making proteins, and proteins carry out the real action inside the cell."
"Each center will focus on developing different types of proteomics technology related to studying the normal and diseased heart, lung, blood and sleep process, according to the NHLBI. Research will include the study of protein profiling, post-translation modifications, and protein-protein interactions.
"These awards take an important step beyond the science of gene research," NHLBI director Claude Lenfant said in a statement. "Research at the level of the gene cannot provide a full picture of what's going on within a cell. These state-of-the-art centers will help supply that missing information and so advance biomedical research and clinical care.""
redux [12.20.01]
[requires 'free' registration]
""Just because you use a protein doesn't make you a proteomics researcher," Joshua LaBaer, director of the Institute of Proteomics at Harvard Medical School, told BioMedNet News.
After the success of genomics, "everyone wants to think of proteomics as the next great science," but calling themselves proteomics researchers "is not really fair," LaBaer said. "A lot of people who claim to do genomics aren't genomic researchers either," he added. "They are just studying gene sequences.""
redux [12.12.01]