Computational Biology (CompBio) including bioinformatics is the study of how computer systems can manage, analyze, and simulate the complex structures and processes inherent in living systems. Naturally this emergence is of critical importance due to the tsunami of data flooding in from biology including the genome projects, proteomics, protein structure determination and the rapid expansion in digitalization of patient biomedical data. CompBio is inherently a multi- disciplinary field with important applications in medicine, agriculture, chemistry and ultimately nanotechnology. Although it is most commonly viewed as a hybrid of biology and computer science, and draws upon work in pattern recognition, simulation science, databases, and statistics and information theory, it has a flavor of its own much as biochemistry acquired its own character after arising from the overlap of biology and chemistry. CompBio Research at IBM spans pattern recognition in sequences, structures and processes, the studying of systems ranging from single protein molecules through to complex molecular interactions, and the data analysis, interpretation and reverse-engineering of complex disease-lifestyle-genomic interactions for fuller biological understanding. These include the IBM protein science initiative and hence link strongly to the Blue Gene petaflop computing initiative. There is a very strong working interaction with IBM Life Sciences, and an ongoing study of how the algorithms developed at the Computational Biology Center can be used to analyze the content of patient records, so enabling the path to a rational, computer-and-genomics-based personalized medicine.http://www.research.ibm.com/compsci/compbio/

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