Computational Biology

The natural world has had billions of years of evolution to perfect systems, creating elegant solutions to tricky problems. CU Boulder Assistant Professor Orit Peleg ’s work hopes to illuminate and explore those solutions with the long-term goal of applying the answers she finds to the materials we interact with...

I recently attended the 2014 Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, and Health Informatics (ACM BCB) with fellow IQ Biology student Joey Azofeifa and our advisor Robin Dowell. The conference had many interesting talks, ranging from theory-heavy explanations of algorithm improvements to very applied talks on using...

Mary Allen holds up a valentine sent to her from a childhood friend. It sits in her cubicle where she is hard at work tearing apart genomic data looking for patterns. This friend, who has Down syndrome, is part of the reason that Allen, a postdoctoral researcher in Robin Dowell’s...

Most university faculty divide their time between research activities, teaching and service to their institutions, sometimes putting in hundreds of hours weekly to accomplish the job’s demands. Being able to shine in all of these areas is a rare accomplishment, especially for newer faculty. For BioFrontiers faculty member Robin Dowell,...

Butcher Seed Grant Winners Seven recipients of the 2014 Butcher Seed Grant Awards were recently notified of their winning proposals in interdisciplinary bioscience. These grants bring critical funding to many of Colorado’s top academic researchers wanting to expand their scientific discoveries and build new collaborations that span disciplines and academic...

BioFrontiers partners with world’s oldest biotech industry: Breweries In the basement of the Jennie Smoly Caruthers Biotechnology Building on CU-Boulder’s East Campus sits a machine that can sequence roughly 6 billion DNA segments in about a week. By comparison, human DNA consists of roughly 3 billion bases, and it took...

JSCBB Mini Symposium Encourages Collaboration It looks a lot like the other buildings on the CU-Boulder campus, with its rustic Italian-inspired tile roof and red brick, but the Jennie Smoly Caruthers Biotechnology Building (affectionately known by its inhabitants as JSCBB) is something quite different. It was designed to support those...

It must be said that I have had a very difficult time writing this blog-post. The reason, after a few too many cups of coffee, came clear to me: Science is Hard (and I worried if that’s what I should tell my readers). Certainly there are intellectual struggles in Science,...

Genotypes, phenotypes, alternators and faulty wiring Robin Dowell understands machines of all kinds. The MCD Biology assistant professor and BioFrontiers faculty member has been restoring old cars since she was 14 years old. She rebuilt her first engine with her dad, who is a petroleum engineer. It was a 1977...

In a new paper released today in Nature , BioFrontiers Institute scientists at the University of Colorado in Boulder, Tom Cech and Leslie Leinwand, detailed a new target for anti-cancer drug development that is sitting at the ends of our DNA. Researchers in the two scientists’ laboratories collaborated to find...