Bio Saga Blog - A Chronicle of Life Sciences & Informatics

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If you love spending time on Facebook, but want to keep on working while “Facebooking” (or whatever the correct verb is) don’t fear. Here are 4 (5) biology-related Facebook applications, most of which you can claim to be working while using. F@H Protein Researcher Folding@Home ( F@H ) is a distributed computing project where individuals allow their free CPU time to create a world-wide super-computer that is used for the study of protein folding. The Protein Researcher Facebook application tracks user statistics for the F&H and includes team pages/walls, a profile box with your individual statistics, and ranked standings. SciBook - Science Social Network SciBook is a Life science social network for scientists. It’s a way for scientists to add the publications they are reading or have successfully published to their profile and discover others on Facebook interested in the same papers. Latest PHD Comics This application puts PHD comics on your profile. It updates automatically, ...

The European Commission has awarded €4.5 million ($7 million) to a consortium of 32 research organizations, universities, and companies from 13 countries to determine how to transform Europe’s biomedical data resources into a transnational “sustainable integrative bioinformatics network” for the life sciences. The consortium is led by the European Bioinformatics Institute. The first year and a half of this project, called ELIXIR, for European Life-science Infrastructure for Biological Information, is aimed at gathering input, performing technical-feasibility studies, and doing user surveys among researchers who generate and use data, and develop tools. Much like the Oxford English Dictionary, which will remain useful as long as people speak English, so, too, will “the infrastructure for biological information … continue as long as people are interested in biology, health, and medicine,” she said. But provisions must be made to allow that to happen, including upgrading the infrast...

Integrative Visual Analysis Tool for Biological Networks and Pathways Already blogging on the topic Structured Digital Abstracts - Easier Literature Searching dicussing the inportance of networks in the form of interactions, and further in several others about visualization tools, here is one more. The essence of a living cell is adaptation to a changing environment, and a central goal of modern cell biology is to understand adaptive change under normal and pathological conditions. Because the number of components is large, and processes and conditions are many, visual tools are useful in providing an overview of relations that would otherwise be far more difficult to assimilate. Historically, representations were static pictures, with genes and proteins represented as nodes, and known or inferred correlations between them (links) represented by various kinds of lines. The modern challenge is to capture functional hierarchies and adaptation to environmental change, and to di...