In this article, the computational methods and tools used in the modelling of the biological neural structures are reviewed. The basic ideas underlying the biological neuron physiology are introduced. A special emphasis is put on the electrical properties of the neurons. The neurons are represented in the models by the equivalent electrical circuits. The single−point spiking−neuron models as we...

Biologists face two problems in interpreting their experiments: the integration of their data with information from multiple heterogeneous sources and data analysis with bioinformatics tools. It is difficult for scientists to choose between the numerous sources and tools without assistance. Following a thorough analysis of scientists’ needs during the querying process, we found that biologists ...

Background Networks have been proven effective representations for the analysis of biological data. As such, there exist multiple methods to extract knowledge from biological networks. However, these approaches usually limit their scope to a single biological entity type of interest or they lack the flexibility to analyze user-defined data. Results We developed ProphTools, a flexible open-sou...

In recent years, nanostructured materials have emerged as potential candidates offering excellent prospects for interfacing the detection of biomolecules. Nanomaterials such as nanoparticles, nanostructured silicates, nano-sized metal oxides, nanostructured polymers, quantum dots, nanocomposites and sensing nanodevices are being utilized worldwide for fabrication of chemical sensors and sensor ...

Biological taxonomy is at the heart of species identifications. Such identifications are instrumental in biodiversity studies, ecological assessment, and phylogenetic analysis, among other studies. Fuzzy measures and classification integration was used to analyze shape groups of the diatom Asterionella using fuzzy Fourier shape coefficients and fuzzy morphometric measures. Based on this analysi...

Experimental high-throughput techniques in biology are generating large amounts of data related to genes and proteins at different levels. The functional analysis of such datasets is a necessary key step in their interpretation. In this contribution we review different methodologies and applications for functional bioinformatics in the context of automated data and text analysis in biology. Int...

Recent interest in proteomics has been fueled by the completion of multiple genome projects and ignited by the common need of biologists to rapidly and comprehensively evaluate complex samples of proteins on a global level. 'Shotgun proteomics' refers to the direct analysis of complex protein mixtures to rapidly generate a global profile of the protein complement within the mixture. This approa...

In this paper, we demonstrate three NLP applications of the BioLexicon, which is a lexical resource tailored to the biology domain. The applications consist of a dictionary-based POS tagger, a syntactic parser, and query processing for biomedical information retrieval. Biological terminology is a major barrier to the accurate processing of literature within biology domain. In order to address t...

Venomous animals use their venoms as tools for defense or predation. These venoms are complex mixtures, mainly enriched of proteic toxins or peptides with several, and different, biological activities. In general, spider venom is rich in biologically active molecules that are useful in experimental protocols for pharmacology, biochemistry, cell biology and immunology, as well as putative tools ...