A competition is a contest between individuals or groups. The gain is often an award or recognition, which serves as a catalyst to motivate individuals to put forth their very best. Such events for recognition and success are part of many International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) Student Council Regional Student Groups (RSGs) activities. These include a popular science article cont...

P robabilistic graphical models (PGMs) have become a popular tool for computational analysis of biological data in a variety of domains. But, what exactly are they and how do they work? How can we use PGMs to discover patterns that are biologically relevant? And to what extent can PGMs help us formulate new hypotheses that are testable at the bench? This Message sketches out some answers and il...

Background: The usefulness of syndromic surveillance for early outbreak detection depends in part on effective statistical aberration detection. However, few published studies have compared different detection algorithms on identical data. In the largest simulation study conducted to date, we compared the performance of six aberration detection algorithms on simulated outbreaks superimposed on ...

The distance to uncontrollability for a linear control system is the distance (in the 2-norm) to the nearest uncontrollable system. We present an algorithm based on methods of Gu and Burke–Lewis–Overton that estimates the distance to uncontrollability to any prescribed accuracy. The new method requires O(n4) operations on average, which is an improvement over previous methods which have complex...

That intravitam staining with basic dyes occurs more readily in alkaline than in acid solutions has long been known. Among the explanations which have been offered to account for this fact two deserve especial mention. The first is that originally proposed byOverton (1), accepted by Harvey (2), and supported in certain respects by the experiments of Robertson (3) (who, however, on other grounds...

INTRODUCTION: Lipid theories of anesthesia implicate perturbation of membrane lipids as the locus for acute anesthetic action. [1] Chronic exposure to alcohols and anesthetics induces an adaptive response in membrane phospholipids that confers resistance to many of the acute actions of alcohols and anesthetics. [2] We have proposed a colligative thermodynamic reformulation of the Meyer-Overton ...

Retrieving information from text has become an important area in bioinformatics, and not too surprisingly, this journal has published more than 30 papers on this topic since the first article published by the journal in 1998. In addition, ISCB (International Society for Computational Biology) (www.iscb.org) has organized special sessions in the ISMB conferences (Intelligent Systems for Molecula...

Background: Evidence suggests an inverse relationship between soy protein intake and serum concentrations of male sex hormones. Anecdotal evidence indicates that these alterations in serum sex hormones may attenuate changes in lean body mass following resistance training. However, little empirical data exists regarding the effects of soy and milk-based proteins on circulating androgens and exer...