Over the past two decades, new technologies have helped scientists generate a vast amount of biological data. Large-scale experiments in genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and cytometry can produce enormous quantities of data from a given cellular or multicellular system. However, making sense of this information is not always easy. This is especially true when trying to analyze complex systems such as the cascade of interactions that occur when the immune system encounters a foreign pathogen. MIT biological engineers have now developed a new computational method for extracting useful information from these datasets. Using their new technique, they showed that they could unravel a series of interactions that determine how the immune system responds to tuberculosis vaccination and subsequent infection. This strategy could be useful to vaccine developers and to researchers who study any kind of complex biological system, says Douglas Lauffenburger, the Ford Professor of...
learn more
