To help compare different orders of magnitude, the following lists describe various mass levels between 10−59 kg and 1052 kg. The least massive thing listed here is a graviton, and the most massive thing is the observable universe. Typically, an object having greater mass will also have greater weight (see mass versus weight), especially if the objects are subject to the same gravitational field strength.
Systems biology is the computational and mathematical analysis and modeling of complex biological systems. It is a biology-based interdisciplinary field of study that focuses on complex interactions within biological systems, using a holistic approach to biological research.
The Rat Genome Database (RGD) is a database of rat genomics, genetics, physiology and functional data, as well as data for comparative genomics between rat, human and mouse. RGD is responsible for attaching biological information to the rat genome via structured vocabulary, or ontology, annotations assigned to genes and quantitative trait loci (QTL), and for consolidating rat strain data and making it available to the research community. They are also developing a suite of tools for mining and analyzing genomic, physiologic and functional data for the rat, and comparative data for rat, mouse, human, and five other species.
Biomedical text mining refers to the methods and study of how text mining may be applied to texts and literature of the biomedical domain. As a field of research, biomedical text mining incorporates ideas from natural language processing, bioinformatics, medical informatics and computational linguistics. The strategies in this field have been applied to the biomedical literature available through services such as PubMed.
The Biological General Repository for Interaction Datasets (BioGRID) is a curated biological database of protein-protein interactions, genetic interactions, chemical interactions, and post-translational modifications created in 2003 (originally referred to as simply the General Repository for Interaction Datasets by Mike Tyers, Bobby-Joe Breitkreutz, and Chris Stark at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute at Mount Sinai Hospital. It strives to provide a comprehensive curated resource for all major model organism species while attempting to remove redundancy to create a single mapping of data. Users of The BioGRID can search for their protein, chemical or publication of interest and retrieve annotation, as well as curated data as reported, by the primary literature and compiled by in house large-scale curation efforts. The BioGRID is hosted in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and Dallas, Texas, United States and is partnered with the Saccharomyces Genome Database, FlyBase, WormBase, PomBase, and the Alliance of Genome Resources. The BioGRID is funded by the NIH and CIHR. BioGRID is an observer member of the International Molecular Exchange Consortium.
BioModels is a free and open-source repository for storing, exchanging and retrieving quantitative models of biological interest created in 2006. All the models in the curated section of BioModels Database have been described in peer-reviewed scientific literature.
The Systems Biology Ontology (SBO) is a set of controlled, relational vocabularies of terms commonly used in systems biology, and in particular in computational modeling.
The BioCyc database collection is an assortment of organism specific Pathway/Genome Databases (PGDBs) that provide reference to genome and metabolic pathway information for thousands of organisms. As of July 2023, there were over 20,040 databases within BioCyc. SRI International, based in Menlo Park, California, maintains the BioCyc database family.
Carla J. Shatz is an American neurobiologist and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Academy of Medicine.
BioPAX is a RDF/OWL-based standard language to represent biological pathways at the molecular and cellular level. Its major use is to facilitate the exchange of pathway data. Pathway data captures our understanding of biological processes, but its rapid growth necessitates development of databases and computational tools to aid interpretation. However, the current fragmentation of pathway information across many databases with incompatible formats presents barriers to its effective use. BioPAX solves this problem by making pathway data substantially easier to collect, index, interpret and share. BioPAX can represent metabolic and signaling pathways, molecular and genetic interactions and gene regulation networks. BioPAX was created through a community process. Through BioPAX, millions of interactions organized into thousands of pathways across many organisms, from a growing number of sources, are available. Thus, large amounts of pathway data are available in a computable form to support visualization, analysis and biological discovery.
Xiaowei Zhuang is a Chinese-American biophysicist who is the David B. Arnold Jr. Professor of Science, Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, and Professor of Physics at Harvard University, and an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She is best known for her work in the development of Stochastic Optical Reconstruction Microscopy (STORM), a super-resolution fluorescence microscopy method, and the discoveries of novel cellular structures using STORM. She received a 2019 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for developing super-resolution imaging techniques that get past the diffraction limits of traditional light microscopes, allowing scientists to visualize small structures within living cells. She was elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019 and was awarded a Vilcek Foundation Prize in Biomedical Science in 2020.
Uri Alon is a Professor and Systems Biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science. His highly cited research investigates gene expression, network motifs and the design principles of biological networks in Escherichia coli and other organisms using both computational biology and traditional experimental wet laboratory techniques.
SABIO-RK is a web-accessible database storing information about biochemical reactions and their kinetic properties.
The MIRIAM Registry, a by-product of the MIRIAM Guidelines, is a database of namespaces and associated information that is used in the creation of uniform resource identifiers. It contains the set of community-approved namespaces for databases and resources serving, primarily, the biological sciences domain. These shared namespaces, when combined with 'data collection' identifiers, can be used to create globally unique identifiers for knowledge held in data repositories. For more information on the use of URIs to annotate models, see the specification of SBML Level 2 Version 2.
Ron Shamir is an Israeli professor of computer science known for his work in graph theory and in computational biology. He holds the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Chair in Bioinformatics, and is the founder and former head of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Bioinformatics at Tel Aviv University.
The human interactome is the set of protein–protein interactions that occur in human cells. The sequencing of reference genomes, in particular the Human Genome Project, has revolutionized human genetics, molecular biology, and clinical medicine. Genome-wide association study results have led to the association of genes with most Mendelian disorders, and over 140 000 germline mutations have been associated with at least one genetic disease. However, it became apparent that inherent to these studies is an emphasis on clinical outcome rather than a comprehensive understanding of human disease; indeed to date the most significant contributions of GWAS have been restricted to the “low-hanging fruit” of direct single mutation disorders, prompting a systems biology approach to genomic analysis. The connection between genotype and phenotype remain elusive, especially in the context of multigenic complex traits and cancer. To assign functional context to genotypic changes, much of recent research efforts have been devoted to the mapping of the networks formed by interactions of cellular and genetic components in humans, as well as how these networks are altered by genetic and somatic disease.
Galit Lahav is an Israeli-American systems biologist and Professor of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School. In 2018 she became Chair of the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School. She is known for discovering the pulsatile behavior of the tumor suppressor protein p53 and uncovering its significance for cell fate, and for her contributions to the culture of mentoring in science. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts.
Biocuration is the field of life sciences dedicated to organizing biomedical data, information and knowledge into structured formats, such as spreadsheets, tables and knowledge graphs. The biocuration of biomedical knowledge is made possible by the cooperative work of biocurators, software developers and bioinformaticians and is at the base of the work of biological databases.
Arren Bar-Even (6 June 1980 - 18 September 2020) was an Israeli biochemist and synthetic biologist. In his research, Bar-Even made pioneering advances in the design and implementation of novel pathways for improved CO2 fixation. and formate utilisation.
Jennifer Waters is an American scientist who is a Lecturer on Cell Biology, the Director of the Nikon Imaging Center, and the Director of the Cell Biology Microscopy Facility at Harvard Medical School. She is an imaging expert and educator whose efforts to educate life scientists about microscopy and to systemize the education of microscopists in microscopy facilities serve as a blueprint for similar efforts worldwide.
