Howard, Daniel

English

PubMed

Daniel Howard

Directory of Open Access Journals

Journal of Biomedicine and Biotechnology

Frontiers in the Convergence of Bioscience 
                        and  Information Technology

Crossref

Hindawi Publishing Corporation
Journal of Biomedicine and Biotechnology
Volume 2008, Article ID 728908, 2 pages
doi:10.1155/2008/728908
Editorial
Frontiers in the Convergence of Bioscience and
Information Technology
Daniel Howard
QinetiQ Limited, Malvern Technology Centre, St Andrew’s Road, Malvern, Worcestershire WR14 3PS, UK
Correspondence should be addressed to Daniel Howard, dr.daniel.howard@gmail.com
Received 15 June 2008; Accepted 15 June 2008
Copyright © 2008 Daniel Howard. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License,
which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
This special issue places its emphasis on the crossroads
between computational modeling and the biosciences. It is
ambitious but fruitful interdisciplinary research, and this
special issue aims to illustrate diﬀerent presentations of it.
It oﬀers those advancing knowledge in some particular area
the view to related research activity and opportunities.
Many of the articles exemplify how mathematics and
computer simulation inform experimentation to obtain new
knowledge about nature. Some articles represent discoveries
and others review, introduce, test, or trial algorithms or
tools that are potentially helpful to arrive at discoveries. A
few articles, however, are reversed in that they demonstrate
how bioinspired algorithms or biological devices can solve
hard computational challenges. Consider that manipulating
chemicals may compute an answer much faster than by
means of the standard silicon-based computer and within
this special issue there is an article by K. Li et al. describing
the principles by which such a DNA computer can compro-
mise an encryption algorithm that is central to present day
secure communications.
One might classify the articles in this special issue
into three groupings: (1) those concerned with biological
problems from molecular cell biology to systems biology,
(2) those which apply classification algorithms in cancer
diagnosis and methods of computer vision to anatomy, and
finally (3) those which oﬀer new knowledge or possibilities
in bioengineering and biomedicine.
The first grouping covers Systems Biology, an exciting
interdisciplinary field that marries experiments with com-
puter simulations. Synthetic and systems biotechnology, for
example, is a technology at these frontiers that aims to
sequester the services of micro-organisms for the benefit of
mankind. Its ability to produce foods in a vat that would
otherwise take up valuable land resources with conventional
agriculture will oﬀer flexibility in food production. In
their article, M.-J. Han et al. reveal how knowledge and
understanding of cell physiology in the presence of oleic acid
are obtained for E. coli. Interesting research about signaling
networks in retina, as induced by light exposure in mice, is
presented by J. Krishnan et al. showing marked alterations in
gene expression upon light exposure. Certain transcription
factors are discovered to be important for the responses
to light-induced retinal loss, revealing that many of the
apoptosis-related genes are up- or downregulated in this
process. In their article, R. Moreno-Sanchez et al. oﬀer a very
useful review of metabolic control analysis (MCA), a tool
that represents a type of engineering control theory for cell
biology and when applicable MCA can help to grapple with
an understanding of the complex control of the metabolic
pathways.
Also in the first grouping, three articles by S. Huang and
his colleagues develop the emergent and interdisciplinary
field of infectomics, which is the study of infectomes encoded
by the genomes of microbes and their hosts. Infectomics
has potential to advance the rational strategies that will
prevent and treat infectious diseases as these could require
a full appreciation of the infectomes that contribute to
microbial infections. There is a need to figure out how to
dissect the dynamic duality relationship between symbiosis
and pathogenesis in microbial infections, and advocates
of this new field oppose what they see as the misguided,
though current and popular, reductionist and Manichean
views of the microbe-human host relationship. Another
article on the topic of infectious diseases by K.-Y. Hwa
et al. investigates the emerging and life-threatening infectious
disease known as SARS, where there is a compelling need
2 Journal of Biomedicine and Biotechnology
for the development of eﬀective therapeutics. Their article
presents interesting and potentially important findings, that
molecular mimicry occurs between SARS-CoV and host
proteins. They investigate how to predict those peptides
that are worthy of exploration for their biological activity.
The article by L. Hamel et al. provides novel insight into
the field of phylogenetics with the idea of the spectra of a
tree, and reviewers identified its potential to compare with
phylogenetic trees across diﬀerent genes and for detecting
lateral gene transfer.
The first grouping of articles also covers specialist
numerical algorithms for gene sequencing, genomics, and
proteomics. With genomic sequencing, an error in contig
assembly causes serious error proliferation, and ConPath (P.-
G. Kim et al.) is a tool that can address this problem. It con-
structs scaﬀolds, ordering and orienting separate sequence
contigs by exploiting the mate-pair information between
contig pairs. C.-K. Chan et al. develop the growing self-
organized map (GSOM) for binning (the clustering of these
unassembled DNA sequences). They report improvements
over the binning that combines oligonucleotide frequency
and self-organizing maps (SOMs), and identify suitable
training features and quantitative measures for assessing
results in this area. In their article, K. Han et al. develop an
algorithm to search for the highly connected subgraphs in
protein interaction networks because this might be helpful
to predict protein function. The article by Mi-Young Kim
expounds a new approach to the very important problem
of text mining of biomolecular text, and is specifically
concerned with detecting gene interactions. There follow two
articles in biological chemistry with computational chem-
istry. C.-J. Kuo et al. solve the crystal structure of H. pylori
undecaprenyl pyrophosphate synthase and perform virtual
screening of inhibitors from a chemical library of thousands
of compounds. M. Muddassar et al. explore receptor-guided
3D-QSAR to design IGF-1R inhibitors by pursuing careful
statistical analysis to interpret the models that are obtained
with the help of contour maps. The article by J.-C. Lue
and W.-C. Fang proposes a compact integrated microsystem
solution for robust, real-time, and onsite genetic analysis.
It uses a preceding VLSI diﬀerential logarithm microchip
that is designed to compute the logarithm of the normalized
input fluorescence signals and a succeeding VLSI artificial
neural network (ANN) processor chip to analyze the pro-
cessed signals from the diﬀerential logarithm stage. It is
submitted that the version of ANN chosen is particularly
adept at recognizing the low-fluorescence patterns.
The second grouping includes cancer diagnosis, biomed-
ical imaging and also computational anatomy (the study of
anatomical variability in health and disease via deformable
templates as inspired by D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson).
These fields sit in the frontiers of biosciences, image analysis,
mathematics, and numerical methods. In this grouping, a
number of articles implement (D. Howard et al.), evaluate
(N. A. Lee et al.), or introduce (J. Kolibal et al.) techniques
of image analysis to cluster, segment, or analyze images,
or extract information or enrich biomedical images. For
example, J. Woo et al. discuss multimodal data integration
for computer-aided ablation of atrial fibrillation. Y. Park et al.
analyze the interpoint dissimilarity comparisons in the hip-
pocampus shape space to distinguish between hippocampi of
subjects with three conditions (clinically depressed, high risk,
and control subject), and discover the high-risk population
closer in shape space to the control population than to the
clinically depressed population. Additionally, they find that
the left hippocampi carry more information than do the
right. In their article, N. A. Lee et al. examine performance
in the segmentation of high-resolution MRI subvolumes
containing hippocampus, prefrontal cortex, and occipital
lobe, as acquired on diﬀerent scanners. They oﬀer evidence
that the alternating kernel mixture algorithm outperforms
alternatives on the ten datasets considered. The availability
of powerful imaging and other sensors, the availability of
information technology, and the nature of modern threats
point to population biometrics as a topic of enormous
current and future importance. Implementing biometrics
well is hard and is not yet properly understood. The
methodological paper by Y. N. Shin et al. proposes a formal
performance evaluation model for a biometric recognition
system. They also implement face recognition systems based
on the proposed model. The model seems to be useful in
terms of database availability, compliance with standards,
and evaluation costs. The proposed formalism may gain
traction for other biometrics, and it has the potential to
inform strategies for population-based biomedical imaging
performance evaluation and standardization. The last article
of this second grouping by J. Wichard et al. evaluates
how bioinspired and computational intelligence algorithms
compare in providing reliable early cancer diagnosis.
The third grouping comprises articles which cover
advances in biomechanics, biophysics, and biomedicine. It
includes a detailed biomechanics study by J. S. Merritt et al.
on the equine distal forelimb, which is a common location
of injuries related to mechanical overload. These authors
combine analysis with experiment in a fairly thorough but
concise way to calculate the forces in the major tendons and
joint reaction from kinematic and kinetic data of walking
and trotting horses. Their findings point to the importance
of muscle tendon wrapping when evaluating joint loading
in the distal forelimb. The article by C. Handapangoda
and M. Premaratne describes a novel numerical technique
for modeling optical pulse propagation in inhomogeneous
scattering and absorption cross-sections through weakly
scattering biological tissues. The design of implantable
electronic devices to interact with the nervous system is an
active field, the development of an eﬃcient system for long-
term stimulation of the optic nerve is rather timely (e.g., it is
required to evaluate the long-term safety of retinal implants),
and the methodological report by J. A. Zhou et al. describes
the design of a suprachoroidal electrical retinal stimulator
for long-term application. Finally, two articles in the third
category advance novel robots (H. Sawada et al.) and haptic
solutions (K.-U. Kyung et al.) that interact with the human
senses and which might prove helpful to the sensorially
impaired.
Daniel Howard
Submit your manuscripts at
http://www.hindawi.com
Hindawi Publishing Corporation
http://www.hindawi.com Volume 2014
 Anatomy 
Research International
Peptides
International Journal of
Hindawi Publishing Corporation
http://www.hindawi.com Volume 2014
Hindawi Publishing Corporation 
http://www.hindawi.com
 International Journal of
Volume 2014
Zoology
Hindawi Publishing Corporation
http://www.hindawi.com Volume 2014
Molecular Biology 
International 
Genomics
International Journal of
Hindawi Publishing Corporation
http://www.hindawi.com Volume 2014
The Scientific 
World Journal
Hindawi Publishing Corporation 
http://www.hindawi.com Volume 2014
Hindawi Publishing Corporation
http://www.hindawi.com Volume 2014
Bioinformatics
Advances in
Marine Biology
Journal of
Hindawi Publishing Corporation
http://www.hindawi.com Volume 2014
Hindawi Publishing Corporation
http://www.hindawi.com Volume 2014
Signal Transduction
Journal of
Hindawi Publishing Corporation
http://www.hindawi.com Volume 2014
BioMed 
Research International
Evolutionary Biology
International Journal of
Hindawi Publishing Corporation
http://www.hindawi.com Volume 2014
Hindawi Publishing Corporation
http://www.hindawi.com Volume 2014
Biochemistry 
Research International
Archaea
Hindawi Publishing Corporation
http://www.hindawi.com Volume 2014
Hindawi Publishing Corporation
http://www.hindawi.com Volume 2014
Genetics 
Research International
Hindawi Publishing Corporation
http://www.hindawi.com Volume 2014
Advances in
Virolog y
Hindawi Publishing Corporation
http://www.hindawi.com
Nucleic Acids
Journal of
Volume 2014
Stem Cells
International
Hindawi Publishing Corporation
http://www.hindawi.com Volume 2014
Hindawi Publishing Corporation
http://www.hindawi.com Volume 2014
Enzyme 
Research
Hindawi Publishing Corporation
http://www.hindawi.com Volume 2014
International Journal of
Microbiology


Frontiers in the Convergence of Bioscience and Information Technology

http://downloads.hindawi.com/journals/bmri/2008/728908.pdf

Frontiers in the Convergence of Bioscience and Information Technology

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Directory of Open Access Journals

Crossref