Transcript COMPUTERS-IN-BIOLOGY

COMPUTERS IN
BIOLOGY
Elizabeth Muros
INTRO TO PERSONAL
COMPUTING
COMPUTERS IN BIOLOGICAL
RESEARCH
Computers have played an important role
in biological research.
 Scientists have used both mainframe and
personal computers to organize results of
their data. Creating databases and new
analytical tools for other scientists to use
in their laboratory investigations.
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For example, in the middle of the 1960’s
the innovative dynamics of cell
multiplication made use of computer codes
originally created for Livermore’s weapons
program.
 The study also contained an resourceful
calculation system with the help of
computer codes to excite cell activity in an
effort to design an optimal radiation
dosage program for cancer therapy.
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In 1968 an extraordinary combination of
an electron microscope and a computer
formed remarkable three-dimensional
images of organelles with tiny working
parts within the cell nucleus.
 In addition, using basically the same
method the human brain employs to make
three dimensional images from two flat
pictures one taken with each eye, the
computer took 12 electron microscope
shots, incorporated the data and created
three-dimensional images of the
organelles that were 50,000 times their
actual size.
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A new combined branch of computer technology
and biology is called Computational biology.
It’s a recently new area of research that uses
exciting tools from first principles of quantum
mechanics to describe the electronic structure of
atoms and their chemical properties.
Computational biology allows researchers to
construct quantum simulations to see within
biochemical processes to learn how reactions
are taking place on a molecular and amazingly
an atomic level too.
Computational biology uses mathematical
and informational techniques including
statistics to solve biological problems.
 It does so, by using computer programs or
mathematical models or creating both.
 One of the major areas of computational
biology is data mining which includes the
analysis of the data collected by several
genome projects.
 Genome projects are scientific projects
that are utilized to map the genome of a
living being in other words the complete
set of genes carried by this being or virus.
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Finally there is the potential to understand living
organisms as complex dynamic systems and to
use large-scale computation to simulate their
behavior in new ways that were once
impossible.
Next generations of supercomputer will make it
possible to move up the biological complexity
ladder and tackle problems that could not be
solve before.
The great advantage to computer technology is
that now much of biology can now begin to be
simulated in computers.
Biological simulations permit for enormous
grounds like in the molecular scale the
design of therapeutic drugs, predictions of
protein structure or microscopic exercises
like the optimization of the placement of
wildlife sanctuaries.
 Administrating the large databases of
experimental biological data will also
necessitate advances in computer
memory and speeds.
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