As part of our Developing Computational Biology series, Wei (Peking University) and Yu (Chinese Academy of Sciences) provide an overview of the past, present and future of bioinformatics in China. Share your thoughts on this topic using our new commentary features.
Vodovotz et al. introduce translational systems biology: the study of complex medical problems by the application of systems biology approaches. They describe efforts to use this method to gain insight into the complex, multi-scale problem of acute inflammation.
Image credit: CDC
A team from Carnegie Mellon University presents a formal framework to infer the evolutionary history of complex multidomain families. They apply the concept of homology to genes that have undergone domain shuffling; distinguishing between common ancestry and insertion of a common domain.
The authors use analysis of somatic mutations to yield precise estimates of cell depth (the number of mitotic divisions a cell has undergone since the zygote). They find that deeper cells tend to acquire more mutations and "drift away" from the original DNA sequence of the fertilized egg.
Tsvi Tlusty and Arbel Tadmor propose a biophysical model of Escherichia coli that predicts growth rate and cellular composition from an effective, coarse-grained representation of its genome. They use this model to examine the impact of rRNA copy number variations on the bacterium’s growth rate.
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