A boost for multi-scale modeling of biological systems

Computational approaches to molecular systems have been around for decades, but biological phenomena that happen over a broad scale of space and time continue to be a challenge. Currently, researchers study various aspects of these scales using individual and varied approaches. Multi-scale modeling is an attempt to study a very significant portion of the scales, leading to greater integration, understanding of pathologies, and ultimately to new and improved treatments.

To further this research, the National Institutes of Health awarded $9.3 million to establish the Biomedical Technology Research Center. Using the five-year funding, Pittsburg Supercomputing Center’s (PSC’s) National Resource for Biomedical Supercomputing (NRBSC), Carnegie Mellon’s Lane Center for Computational Biology, and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine will collaboratively develop computational tools for modeling and simulating biological systems.

Ivet Bahar, principal investigator on the project and chair of the Department of Computational and Systems Biology at Pittsburgh School of Medicine, notes that the center’s overarching goal is “to bridge the gaps between molecular-, cellular- and tissue-level information to build integrated models of cell signaling and regulation.”

“Until now, experimental scientists have been collecting data that are not testable by computational methods, while computational scientists have been building models and making predictions that cannot be verified experimentally,” explained Bahar. “We aim to bridge this communication gap, solving relevant problems computationally while generating new hypotheses that can be tested in the lab.”

Markus Dittrich, head of NRBSC, sees many opportunities to combine PSC’s strengths in cellular modeling, structural biology, and image analysis with the outstanding computational biology programs at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon. “It is a very exciting time in the computational arena. We have the capability to really make a difference and help find better ways to understand these systems.”

Center researchers will also have access to Anton, a 512 node special purpose supercomputer for molecular dynamics simulations. Anton resides at NRBSC and is available for non-commercial research.

You can learn more about research enabled by this new collaboration here. 

- Amber Harmon