Bio Saga Blog - A Chronicle of Life Sciences & Informatics

Scientists at the University of Sheffield have shown how bacteria could be used as a future fuel. The research, published in the journal Bioinformatics, could have significant implications for the environment and the way we produce sustainable fuels in the future. Like all living creatures, bacteria sustain themselves through their metabolism, a huge sequence of chemical reactions that transform nutrients into energy and waste. Using mathematical computer models, the Sheffield team have mapped the metabolism of a type of bacteria called Nostoc. Nostoc fixes nitrogen and, in doing so, releases hydrogen that can then potentially be used as fuel. Fixing nitrogen is an energy intensive process and it wasn´t entirely clear exactly how the bacterium produces the energy it needs in order to perform. Now the new computer system has been used to map out how this happens. Until now, scientists have had difficulties identifying bacteria metabolic pathways. The bacterial metabolism is a huge netwo...

HCL founder and chairman and chief strategy officer of HCL Technologies Shiv Nadar was named for the Padma Bhushan honour . Here is yet an interesting and inspiring story of another Shiva, to those aspiring a career in informatics as well as all aspiring entrepreneurs. In the 26 years since he first arrived at MIT as a freshman, V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai has earned four MIT degrees and started two multimillion dollar companies. This fall, he will use his most recent degree, a Ph.D. in computational systems biology, and a Fulbright Scholarship to explore one of his lifelong interests: the intersection of Eastern and Western medicine. Ayyadurai started dreaming as a child in India, where his grandfather was a farmer and his grandmother a shaman, or traditional healer. He became interested in medicine watching his grandmother diagnose and treat patients based on a system of "elements"--earth, water, fire, metal and wood. That approach may seem strange to Westerners, but "you...

Scientists at Edinburgh University have been studying complex mathematical models on a highly powerful computing system to look at the case of the Amazon Molly. Researchers calculated the time to extinction for the fish based on modelling genetic changes over many thousands of generations. They are now able to say conclusively, for the first time, the fish ought to have become extinct within the past 70,000 years, based on the current simple models. Evolution @ home is the first global computing system for evolution ary biology. It allows everybody with an Internet PC to contribute to evolution ary-research by running simulations of evolution . The research is published in the journal BMC Evolutionary Biology. and the News is on BBC too