Bioinformatics is an interdisciplinary field of science that develops methods and software tools for understanding biological data, especially when the data sets are large and complex. Bioinformatics uses biology, chemistry, physics, computer science, computer programming, information engineering, mathematics and statistics to analyze and interpret biological data. The process of analyzing and interpreting data can sometimes be referred to as computational biology, however this distinction between the two terms is often disputed. To some, the term computational biology refers to building and using models of biological systems.
Molecular biology is a branch of biology that seeks to understand the molecular basis of biological activity in and between cells, including biomolecular synthesis, modification, mechanisms, and interactions.
The branches of science known informally as omics are various disciplines in biology whose names end in the suffix -omics, such as genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, metagenomics, phenomics and transcriptomics. Omics aims at the collective characterization and quantification of pools of biological molecules that translate into the structure, function, and dynamics of an organism or organisms.
Institute for Systems Biology (ISB) is a non-profit research institution located in Seattle, Washington, United States. ISB concentrates on systems biology, the study of relationships and interactions between various parts of biological systems, and advocates an interdisciplinary approach to biological research.
Spatiotemporal gene expression is the activation of genes within specific tissues of an organism at specific times during development. Gene activation patterns vary widely in complexity. Some are straightforward and static, such as the pattern of tubulin, which is expressed in all cells at all times in life. Some, on the other hand, are extraordinarily intricate and difficult to predict and model, with expression fluctuating wildly from minute to minute or from cell to cell. Spatiotemporal variation plays a key role in generating the diversity of cell types found in developed organisms; since the identity of a cell is specified by the collection of genes actively expressed within that cell, if gene expression was uniform spatially and temporally, there could be at most one kind of cell.
Articles related specifically to biomedical engineering include:
VIB is a research institute located in Flanders, Belgium. It was founded by the Flemish government in 1995, and became a full-fledged institute on 1 January 1996. The main objective of VIB is to strengthen the excellence of Flemish life sciences research and to turn the results into new economic growth. VIB spends almost 80% of its budget on research activities, while almost 12% is spent on technology transfer activities and stimulating the creation of new businesses, in addition VIB spends approximately 2% on socio-economic activities. VIB is member of EU-LIFE, an alliance of leading life sciences research centres in Europe.
Bruker Corporation is an American manufacturer of scientific instruments for molecular and materials research, as well as for industrial and applied analysis. It is headquartered in Billerica, Massachusetts, and is the publicly traded parent company of Bruker Scientific Instruments and Bruker Energy & Supercon Technologies (BEST) divisions.
Codexis, Inc. is a protein engineering company that develops enzymes for pharmaceutical, food and medical applications.
Eugene Wimberly "Gene" Myers, Jr. is an American computer scientist and bioinformatician, who is best known for contributing to the early development of the NCBI's BLAST tool for sequence analysis.
Xenbase is a Model Organism Database (MOD), providing informatics resources, as well as genomic and biological data on Xenopus frogs. Xenbase has been available since 1999, and covers both X. laevis and X. tropicalis Xenopus varieties. As of 2013 all of its services are running on virtual machines in a private cloud environment, making it one of the first MODs to do so. Other than hosting genomics data and tools, Xenbase supports the Xenopus research community though profiles for researchers and laboratories, and job and events postings.
In cell biology, single-cell analysis and subcellular analysis refer to the study of genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and cell–cell interactions at the level of an individual cell, as opposed to more conventional methods which study bulk populations of many cells.
Multiomics, multi-omics, integrative omics, "panomics" or "pan-omics" is a biological analysis approach in which the data sets are multiple "omes", such as the genome, proteome, transcriptome, epigenome, metabolome, and microbiome ; in other words, the use of multiple omics technologies to study life in a concerted way. By combining these "omes", scientists can analyze complex biological big data to find novel associations between biological entities, pinpoint relevant biomarkers and build elaborate markers of disease and physiology. In doing so, multiomics integrates diverse omics data to find a coherently matching geno-pheno-envirotype relationship or association. The OmicTools service lists more than 99 pieces of software related to multiomic data analysis, as well as more than 99 databases on the topic.
The Centre for Genomic Regulation is a biomedical and genomics research centre based in Barcelona. Most of its facilities and laboratories are located in the Barcelona Biomedical Research Park, in front of Somorrostro beach.
Kevin Donald Lustig is an American scientist and entrepreneur and founder of three life science companies: the pharmaceutical company Kalypsys in 2001; the online research marketplace Scientist.com in 2007; and the non-profit lab incubator Bio, Tech and Beyond in 2013.
Intellia Therapeutics, Inc. is an American clinical-stage biotechnology company focused on developing novel, potentially curative therapeutics leveraging CRISPR-based technologies. The company's in vivo programs use intravenously administered CRISPR as the therapy, in which the company's proprietary delivery technology enables highly precise editing of disease-causing genes directly within specific target tissues. Intellia's ex vivo programs use CRISPR to create the therapy by using engineered human cells to treat cancer and autoimmune diseases.
Spatial transcriptomics is a method that captures positional context of transcriptional activity within intact tissue. The historical precursor to spatial transcriptomics is in situ hybridization, where the modernized omics terminology refers to the measurement of all the mRNA in a cell rather than select RNA targets. It comprises an important part of spatial biology.
The Visible Embryo Project (VEP) is a multi-institutional, multidisciplinary research project originally created in the early 1990s as a collaboration between the Developmental Anatomy Center at the National Museum of Health and Medicine and the Biomedical Visualization Laboratory (BVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago, "to develop software strategies for the development of distributed biostructural databases using cutting-edge technologies for high-performance computing and communications (HPCC), and to implement these tools in the creation of a large-scale digital archive of multidimensional data on normal and abnormal human development." This project related to BVL's other research in the areas of health informatics, educational multimedia, and biomedical imaging science. Over the following decades, the list of VEP collaborators grew to include over a dozen universities, national laboratories, and companies around the world.
Laura Attardi is the Catharine and Howard Avery Professor of the school of medicine, and professor of radiation oncology and genetics at Stanford University where she leads the Attardi Laboratory. Attardi studies the tumor suppressor protein p53 and the gene that encodes it, TP53, to better understand mechanisms for preventing cancer.
