By stitching together an unprecedented diversity of data, a new software platform has enabled scientists to robustly predict what proteins do. In the symphony of life, if DNA is the conductor, proteins make the music. By controlling everything from the contraction of a muscle before a leap to the digestion of a bite of food, […]
Center for Computational Biology Once hooked, Sonya Hanson doesn’t give up. She still plays the French horn her father gave her when she was 9 years old (most recently with the L Train Brass Band in Manhattan). And three years into her graduate research, when Hanson realized her project wasn’t working, she did not despair. […]
Last August, A. Murat Eren, who goes by “Meren,” leaned over the edge of a boat off the coast of Hawai‘i. Then, holding a 20-liter plastic jug, he submerged his arm into the Pacific Ocean and filled the container with water teeming with microscopic life. Recalling the moment in his blog, he wrote, “This was the […]
A cast of so-called ‘nurse cells’ surrounds and supports the growing fruit fly egg during development, supplying the egg — or ‘oocyte’ — with all the nutrients and molecules it needs to thrive. Long viewed as passive in this process, the Drosophila egg actually plays an active role not only in its own growth, but […]
When Chandra Theesfeld, a research scientist at the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University, was starting her career as a biologist, she knew that studying the human genome came with significant challenges. At the time, high-quality curated databases could help those scientists studying smaller organisms, like yeasts and worms, but nothing remotely comparable […]
In new research, scientists take a biophysical approach to deciphering the cell’s mysteries. The human body is composed of more than 1 trillion cells, yet each human body begins as just one cell. To go from one to 1 trillion requires cell division: the very precise process by which chromosomes, the cell’s genetic material, are […]
