Mission

The Center for Research in Biological Systems (CRBS) is a UCSD organized research unit (ORU) that exists to provide human resources, high technology equipment, and administrative services to scientists researching cell structure and function relationships in central nervous system processes, cardiovascular networking, and muscular contraction through multiple scales and modalities.

CRBS facilitates an interdisciplinary infrastructure in which people from biology, medicine, chemistry, and physics can work with those from computer science and information technologies in collaborative research. Researchers share interests in the study of complex biological systems at many scales, from the structures of enzymes, proteins, and the body's chemical communications network at atomic and molecular levels, to an organism's physiology, strength, and support at cellular and tissue levels. (more...)

Research Highlight

UCSD and the Venter Institute establish a Web-based resource for advancing metagenomic research

March 2007—The Community Cyberinfrastructure for Advanced Marine Microbial Ecology Research and Analysis (CAMERA) project launched its Web site to the public on January 23, 2007. By leveraging emerging technologies in distributed data storage and analysis not commonly found in gene sequence resources, the CAMERA Web site (camera.calit2.net) is on its way to create a community resource to enable researchers to access high-performance computational resources and analyze raw environmental sequence data and associated metadata - innovative cyberinfrastructure not currently available at other gene sequence resources.

Led by a multi-disciplinary group from the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) at UCSD, CAMERA is a collaboration of the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) of Rockville Maryland, the Center for Earth Observations and Applications and the Scripps Genome Center (both at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography), and the San Diego Supercomputer Center. It has brought together leaders in high-throughput DNA sequencing and metagenomic analysis tools, with advanced cyberinfrastructure-optically coupled computing, emerging Grid middleware, and user workspaces. Responding to the needs of an exceptionally broad, multidisciplinary scientific community, the CAMERA team is developing and deploying tools that will allow biologists to access and analyze millions of gene sequences in a collaborative Web-based work environment, or Portal. (more...)