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Cancer research has been reinforced by the fact that scientists have created the largest simulation so far of an entire gene for DNA.
In our quest to fully understand the human body to the smallest level, researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory have sifted a tremendous amount of information in order to create a model of a billion dollars. # 39; atoms. This is not a simple collection of atoms, but the largest ever simulation of an entire gene of DNA.
In doing so, researchers will now better understand how to develop treatments – and even cures – for the most common diseases, such as cancer. This is an important first step towards creating a complete picture of how DNA grows and contracts.
"It's important to understand DNA at this level of detail because we want to understand precisely how genes are turned on and off," said Karissa Sanbonmatsu, a structural biologist at Los Alamos. "Knowing how this happens could reveal the secrets about the number of diseases that are occurring."
Publish their discoveries in the Journal of Computational Chemistry, the researchers created the simulation using the central Trinity supercomputer – the sixth fastest in the world – also used to monitor the vast stock of nuclear weapons in the United States.
In a DNA molecule, there is a network of tiny molecular coils called histone proteins. Depending on how they wind and unfold, they can turn genes on and off. So, when the DNA is more compact, the genes are turned off and when they are developed they are activated.
How or why this happens has remained a mystery, that is why researchers have turned to supercomputers to help solve it. However, to be able to model an entire genome in the future, scientists will need exascale supercomputers that can perform quintillion calculations every second.
Once this is achieved, future health care could quickly compare a healthy genome to that of a patient who may have a particular type of cancer. According to Sanbonmatsu, this could even help us to develop research on autism and intellectual disabilities.
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