Biology, Volume 3, Issue 1

The identification of novel biomarkers from human plasma remains a critical need in order to develop and monitor drug therapies for nearly all disease areas. The discovery of novel plasma biomarkers is, however, significantly hampered by the complexi...

Given a set of nucleotide sequences we consider the problem of identifying conserved substrings occurring in homologous genes in a large number of sequences. The problem is solved by identifying certain nodes in a suffix tree containing all substring...

Biological moonlighting refers to proteins which express more than one function. Moonlighting proteins occur in pathogenic and commensal as well as in Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria. The canonical functions of moonlighting proteins are in e...

Based on in vitro assays, we performed a High Throughput Screening (HTS) to identify kinase inhibitors among 10,000 small chemical compounds. In this didactic paper, we describe step-by-step the approach to validate the hits as well as the major pitf...

The editors of Biology would like to express their sincere gratitude to the following reviewers for assessing manuscripts in 2013. [...]

McArdle disease (glycogen storage disease Type V; MD) is a metabolic myopathy caused by a deficiency in muscle glycogen phosphorylase. Since muscle glycogen is an important fuel for muscle during exercise, this inborn error of metabolism provides a m...

A nano-flow high-resolution screening platform, featuring a parallel chip-based microfluidic bioassay and mass spectrometry coupled to nano-liquid chromatography, was applied to screen animal venoms for nicotinic acetylcholine receptor like (nAChR) a...

Hsp90 has become the target of intensive investigation, as inhibition of its function has the ability to simultaneously incapacitate proteins that function in pathways that represent the six hallmarks of cancer. While a number of Hsp90 inhibitors hav...

Putting new findings into the context of available literature knowledge is one approach to deal with the surge of high-throughput data results. Furthermore, prior knowledge can increase the performance and stability of bioinformatic algorithms, for e...

Polar microbiology is a thriving branch of science with the potential to provide new insights into a wide range of basic and applied issues in biology. In this context, it is timely to review and highlight the progress so far and discuss exciting...

Polar Regions are unique and highly prolific ecosystems characterized by extreme environmental gradients. Photosynthetic autotrophs, the base of the food web, have had to adapt physiological mechanisms to maintain growth, reproduction and metabolic a...

Sequencing across the junction between an integrated transfer DNA (T-DNA) and a host plant genome provides two important pieces of information. The junctions themselves provide information regarding the proportion of T-DNA which has integrated into t...

The integration of networks with genomics (network genomics) is a familiar field. Conventional network analysis takes advantage of the larger coverage and relative stability of gene expression measurements. Network proteomics on the other hand has to...

In this survey paper, we will present a number of core algorithmic questions concerning several transitive reduction problems on network that have applications in network synthesis and analysis involving cellular processes. Our starting point will be...