Biology

A simple scoop of soil or water can hold an entire ecosystem–potentially millions or more microscopic organisms and the countless proteins they rely on to survive.

Computations performed at the …
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by Kim Askey, askeyka@ornl.gov, 865.576.2841

A team of scientists led by the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) …
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Since a team at the University of Texas at Austin and the National Institutes of Health first mapped the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein—the main infection machinery of the virus that causes …
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Every year at the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC), one deserving team is awarded the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Gordon Bell Prize to …
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Researchers at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) have used the world’s most powerful and smartest supercomputer, the IBM AC922 Summit, to identify 77 small-molecule drug …
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The black cottonwood tree, or Populus trichocarpa (poplar), serves as a model organism for scientists studying the structure, growth, development, and genetics of plants. Poplar was the first tree genome scientists …
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A visualization of a new structure of the human PIC. The spheres correspond to the positions of patient-derived mutations color-coded by disease phenotype. Video credit: Ivaylo Ivanov, …
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Researchers at the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory broke the exascale barrier, achieving a peak throughput of 1.88 exaops—faster than any previously reported science application—while analyzing genomic …
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During normal photosynthesis, plants capture sunlight and carry out respiration during the day, taking in carbon dioxide that will be used to form carbohydrates. But a small percentage of plant …
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The chemical neurotransmitter dopamine is critical to sending and receiving signals in the nervous system linked to motor movements, learning, and habit formation, which is why many therapies for drug …
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Photosynthesis, the method plants use to convert energy from the sun into food, is a ubiquitous process many people learn about in elementary school. Almost all plants use photosynthesis to …
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The US Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science has awarded nearly 1 billion processor hours to 22 projects at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF)— a DOE Office …
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To better understand the biological processes that govern lipid raft formation—processes with broad implications for research ranging from how cells regulate proteins to how viruses invade healthy human cells—ORNL researchers are using two world-class research facilities to study the presence and formation of these nanoscale lipid patches.
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Using computational molecular dynamics simulations, researchers at ORNL and the University of Tennessee–ORNL Joint Institute for Computational Sciences have discovered a molecular “switch” in a receptor that controls cell behavior.
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A simulation of the internal workings of cells has reached a sustained performance of 20,000 trillion calculations per second, or 20 petaflops, on the Titan supercomputer at ORNL.
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OLCF Director of Science Jack Wells spoke recently to the annual Bio-IT World Conference & Expo in Boston, sharing ORNL’s supercomputing experience.
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