Articles by Chris Smith

A key facet of any drug discovery effort is the library-screening step in which researchers test millions of chemical compounds for a desired property. Scientists must try to determine what the resulting leads have in common, chemically speaking, and then they must scour chemical libraries for other candidate compounds containing those features. This, fundamentally, is the challenge of cheminformatics. Scott Hutton, president and CEO of San Diego-based ChemNavigator.com Inc., defines cheminforma

Cell Signaling Reagents All biological processes result from integrated and concerted molecular events. For example, enzyme catalysis is not defined solely by kinetic activity; it is the culmination of a series of events, including activation of the enzyme, substrate synthesis and availability, direct and indirect product and substrate feedback control, and interactions with inhibitors or stimulators. In essence the entire process of protein activation is a cascade of events, each serving as a

Table of Bioinformatics Systems (Enhanced version) The entire process of discovery and invention is a marriage of inquiry, experimentation, and observation, and the product of learning and extending upon the findings of previous investigations. Many of the major scientific and technological discoveries of the 20th century were in part a product of knowledgeable, intuitive researchers who utilized innovative problem-solving approaches and protocols and had the experimental means and comprehens

Date: December 7, 1998Statistical Software Table The science of biometry, or biological statistics, and the art of graphic display have made major advances with the advent of the desktop computer. These advances include quick, multivariant statistical analyses of large data sets and real-time re-analyses with different parameters; the ability to test a mathematical model with raw data; and a multitude of two- and three-dimensional graphical display methods. A wide array of statistics applicatio

Date: July 6, 1998Genomic DNA Isolation Kits The first isolation of DNA is generally credited to Friedrich Miescher, who in the late 1860s was studying proteins, which were discovered a mere three decades earlier. Proteins and DNA--what's the relationship? While attempting to investigate the characteristics of protein in pus cells, Miescher noticed that weakly alkaline cellular extracts, when neutralized, yielded a precipitate; however, the precipitate did not exhibit any of the then known pro