Cell Biology 1984: Merging Disciplines

Quantitative cell biology: uniting disciplines to understand the cell

Type disciplines for systems biology

During the last years Computer Science and Biology are getting closer, helping and inspiring each other: for example, the Human Genome Project (HGP), the scientific research project with the goal of determining the sequence of chemical base pairs which make up DNA, would have been impossible without computer clusters and pattern recognition algorithms. On the other hand, Computer Scientists are...

Developmental biology, the stem cell of biological disciplines

Developmental biology (including embryology) is proposed as "the stem cell of biological disciplines." Genetics, cell biology, oncology, immunology, evolutionary mechanisms, neurobiology, and systems biology each has its ancestry in developmental biology. Moreover, developmental biology continues to roll on, budding off more disciplines, while retaining its own identity. While its descendant di...

Laurie Glimcher: Merging cell biology and immune function

T rained in research by some of the giants of immunology, Laurie Glimcher is herself a major force in that fi eld. Most of her career has fo-cused on understanding how different subsets of immune cells develop and are regulated (1). However, Glimcher is known in cell biology circles for her discovery of XBP-1 (2), a transcription factor that turned out to be important in lipogenesis (3) and in ...

Biochemistry and evolutionary biology: Two disciplines

Biochemical information has been crucial for the development of evolutionary biology. On the one hand, the sequence information now appearing is producing a huge increase in the amount of data available for phylogenetic analysis; on the other hand, and perhaps more fundamentally, it allows understanding of the mechanisms that make evolution possible. Less well recognized, but just as important,...