A grant has been awarded to the BioMicro Center at MIT to acquire high-performance computers for research in biology and biological engineering. The systems will be among the most powerful at MIT and will be dedicated to advancing the research programs of an active group of young faculty. These Assistant and Associate Professors lead research teams working on a wide range of problems in computational biology. The teams are united in their interest in the application of numerical models, computational simulations and large-scale computation to biological problems. The completion of the human genome sequence has emphasized the remarkable complexity of biological processes. While traditional molecular biology and molecular medicine will continue to play an important role in unraveling how these processes work, it seems almost certain that fundamental advances will come from the application of quantitative and rigorous analytic methods. The research includes Professor Amy Keating's work on protein design. Dr. Keating's goal is to discern the rules governing protein-protein interactions through calculation and simulation and to then apply the rules to actual experiments. Professor Mike Yaffe will use computation to mine the human genome for proteins that play crucial roles in the transmission of signals within cells. Dr. Yaffe hopes to determine how circuits are constructed in cells, and to compare these circuits to electronic and mechanical circuits. Professor Tidor will use large-scale calculations to try to determine how proteins interact with each other and with small molecules (such as drugs). This is a long-standing problem in structural biology, but Dr. Tidor has recently shown that approximations drawn from engineering can be successfully applied to the problems that have proven to be impossible to calculate using conventional methods. The new facility will not only enhance novel research but also graduate and undergraduate education. A new set of courses have the unusual distinction of being in the curriculum of three different departments: biology, biological engineering, and computer science. The group's intention is to expose students to the very latest computational methods and computer systems. Thus, high-performance computing will not only have a direct impact on world-class science, but also on education and training. With the help of Prof. Amy Keating, the group is working hard to attract additional women to computational biology. In the physical sciences women are significantly under-represented. Computational biology holds great promise as a discipline in which the historically inequitable under-representation of women in physical sciences can be overcome by association with biology.
