Making Biological Computing Smarter

The Hum and the GenomeAs genome sequence data accumulates exponentially, the infrastructure that handles it all also needs to break new ground(Stuart Blackman)

Minds Must UniteIt's time for experimentalists to stop ignoring computational modelers(David L. Donoho, David Mumford, and Bruno A. Olshausen)

Nina Fedoroff (left) is Willaman Professor of Life Sciences and an Evan Pugh Professor in the department of biology and the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences at Pennsylvania State University. She is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Steve Racunas (center) is a postdoctoral fellow at the Huck Institutes. Jeff Shrager (right) is a research fellow at the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Department of Plant Biology at Stanford University. The authors are collaborating on a computational toolkit for expressing and checking the consistency of biological models with existing knowledge and data.

Experimental biologists today sit at the edge of enormous bodies of information. Although ...