Human Genome Folds Form Computer Program For Life

Software application developers have long sought to manipulate and exploit the processing power available to them in order to get the most out of the applications and systems that they seek to program. In this post-millennial era of app enlightenment, a huge percentage of us know that the brains of a computer is called the Central Processing Unit or CPU for short. So when programmers need something faster and more powerful than a CPU, where do they go?

Software developers working on geospatial intelligence systems, bio molecular research programs, scientific research and (perhaps surprisingly) high-end computer games will often look to use a Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) alongside their CPU-based power.

How GPUs accelerate computers

Sometimeslabeled High Performance Computing (HPC), this type of software development relies on the GPUs ability to manipulate and alter a computers calls to memory at extremely high speeds. This allows the machine to accelerate the creation, delivery and presentation of image-related data that will end up being displayed on screen. In simple terms, it means we can make computers do really cool and often really insightful stuff. So like what?

Mapping out a human beings genome structure involves a lot more graphics power than Space Invaders ever did, so GPUs fit the bill well. The human genetic instruction book contains roughly three billion base pairs of DNA. While the genome in every cell of the body is identical, each type of cell needs to be different to serve its specific purpose e.g. growing, fighting disease, creating hormones or one of several other hundreds of thousands of jobs.

So how do your bodys individual cells get programmed to do the right thing on any given day? Developers and researchers have used Nvidia GPUs to work out what appears to be the answer.

The human genome folds into 10,000 loops

Researchers from Baylor College of Medicine, Rice University, MIT and Harvard University used Nvidia Tesla GPUs to time-map how the human genome folds itself to form a computing instruction set for our own body to work from. They created the first high-resolution 3-D maps of entire folded genomes and found the human genome is folded into around 10,000 loops.

Original post:
Human Genome Folds Form Computer Program For Life