©2003 EUROPEAN MOLECULAR BIOLOGY ORGANIZATION EMBO reports VOL 4 | special issue | 2003 S53 The First World War left millions dead on the battlefields of Europe, and the survivors returned home with the experience of the first industrial-style war fresh in their minds. It was particularly because of the horrors created by the use of chemical weapons and the mutilation that these gases caused th...

&THE ABILITY TO perform DNA analysis, clinical diagnostics, and biomolecule detection and manipulation using miniaturized devices has many practical applications. Although designing and testing such devices is challenging, researchers and engineers are beginning to build labs on chips (LoCs) with exciting functionality. LoC applications include synthesizing new materials, studying complex cellu...

The OBML 2010 workshop, held at the University of Mannheim on September 9-10, 2010, is the 2nd in a series of meetings organized by the Working Group "Ontologies in Biomedicine and Life Sciences" of the German Society of Computer Science (GI) and the German Society of Medical Informatics, Biometry and Epidemiology (GMDS). Integrating, processing and applying the rapidly expanding information ge...

The life sciences have entered into the realm of big data and data-enabled science, where data can either empower or overwhelm. These data bring the challenges of the 5 Vs of big data: volume, veracity, velocity, variety, and value. Both independently and through our involvement with DELSA Global (Data-Enabled Life Sciences Alliance, DELSAglobal.org), the Kolker Lab ( kolkerlab.org ) is creatin...

In this paper an overview about the applications of Aerogels in the fields of pharmacy, cosmetics, medicine, agriculture and biotechnology is given. The in situ encapsulation of proteins and enzymes into aerogels was shown to be a very promising technique leading to the increase of biocatalytical activity. Furthermore aerogels are used as host matrix for bio-active compounds, which improve or e...

Structured population dynamics deals with the time evolution of the population composition with respect to the state of the individuals. Typically, the structuring variables are age (with different interpretations, e.g. chronological or time since infection or time since cell division), size, phenotype, maturity level, space, etc. The simplest structure is given by the age of the individuals si...

We review technical and sociological issues facing the Life Sciences as they transform into more data-centric disciplines - the "Big New Biology". Three major challenges are: 1) lack of comprehensive standards; 2) lack of incentives for individual scientists to share data; 3) lack of appropriate infrastructure and support. Technological advances with standards, bandwidth, distributed computing,...

The job of a scientist is to make a discovery and then communicate this new knowledge to others. For a scientist to be successful, he or she needs to be able to claim credit or priority for discoveries throughout their career. However, despite being fundamental to the reward system of science, the principles for establishing the "priority of discovery" are rarely discussed. Here we break down p...

The volume of bioinformatics data produced by research laboratories worldwide is increasing at an astonishing rate turning the need to adequately catalogue, represent and index the vast amounts of produced data sources into a pressing challenge. Semantic Web technologies have achieved signi cant progress towards the federation of biochemical information via the de nition and use of domain vocab...