Computational biology touches all bases

All biology is computational biology

Here, I argue that computational thinking and techniques are so central to the quest of understanding life that today all biology is computational biology. Computational biology brings order into our understanding of life, it makes biological concepts rigorous and testable, and it provides a reference map that holds together individual insights. The next modern synthesis in biology will be driv...

Covering all the bases.

Computational Biology

A pair in a string is the occurrence of the same substring twice. A pair is maximal if the two occurrences of the substring cannot be extended to the left and right without making them different. The gap of a pair is the number of characters between the two occurrences of the substring. In this paper we present methods for finding all maximal pairs under various constraints on the gap. In a str...

Computational Biology

2. Computational Genomics and Proteomics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 2.1. DNA Sequencing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 2.2. DNA and RNA Structures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 2.3. Protein Sequencing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 2.4. Protein Structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 2.5. ...

BRCA1 touches up microRNAs

RNF169 flips the repair switch P oulsen et al. describe an enzyme that helps a cell determine which repair method to use on DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs). Unrepaired DSBs can incite genomic chaos, spurring sections of chromosomes to relocate or even vanish. To ensure that doesn’t happen, a cell wraps a molecular bandage around a DSB. Enzymes arrive at the injury and ubiquitylate the surroundi...