Although bioinformatics has made deep advancements since its advent nearly half a century ago, there are still many ongoing places of research in the field that will produce novel insights within the next few decades. Here are the top 20 research areas in computational biology: Rapid structural and topological clustering…

Due to the versatility of DNA, it’s crucially important to determine what certain parts of the gene do. Looking at RNA polymerase transcription, it’s clear that there are three major regions in genes: Promoter regions: regions upstream or next to where a gene will be transcribed that RNA polymerase binds…

As a company that recognizes that genes have already been read, Inscripta is blazing the way for the future by trying to write them through gene editing. …

Note: Before reading this article, read Sequence Alignment and the Needleman-Wunsch Algorithm to understand primary sequence alignment and dynamic programming; here, we extend our analysis to secondary RNA alignment through Nussinov’s Algorithm. Terminology RNA Terms RNA: ribonucleic acid comprised of the 5-carbon sugar, ribose, which is attached to an organic base Uracil: a…

This summer, I had the incredible opportunity to be an intern at Ocean Genomics, a startup that is trying to push the forefront of RNA-sequencing by compiling and creating methods to analyze RNA-sequencing today in one pipeline, for two months. As someone who recently got into computational biology and was…

An increase in average global temperature by over 1 degree Celsius since industrial times. 16 of the 17 warmest years ever have been in the twentieth century. The cause? Climate change. Climate change is an abstracted word that has been used to describe the issues of rising global temperatures and…

The Epigenome and Its Function What is the Epigenome? The human body has over 210 cell types, even though each one of those cells stores the same information inside of their DNA. How is this possible? The epigenome stores the information about the cell type and the state of the cell: it creates chemical modifications that influence gene expression. …

This article goes into how I used the visualization tool PyMOL for examining 3D representations of the aforementioned proteins, and looking into detail into various protein-protein and protein-DNA interactions. Terminology BRCA2 — the Breast Cancer Type 2 susceptibility protein — The protein is crucial to repairing DNA damage and response pathways…

Did you know that human DNA and chimp DNA are 98.8% the same? Although this number may sound small, humans and chimps are very different when we go into our DNA. Out of the roughly three billion base pairs that make up our genetic code, 1.2% of them equates to…