LIFE SCIENCES

Diabetes reaches epidemic proportions with a major and growing economic impact on the society. An effective treatment requires atomic-level understanding of how insulin acts on cells. Using molecular dynamics simulations, an international team of researchers studied the process of insulin binding to its receptor and the resulting structural changes at atomic scale with cryogenic election microscopy and atomistic MD simulation. The results of these studies were recently published in the Journal of Cell Biology.

Computational mechanistic modelling using systems of ordinary differential equations (ODE) has become an integral tool in systems biology. Parameters of such models are often not known in advance and need to be inferred from experimental data, which is computationally very expensive. The SuperMUC supercomputer enabled researchers from the Helmholtz Zentrum Munich to evaluate state-of-the-art algorithms and to develop novel, more efficient algorithms for parameter estimation from large datasets and relative measurements.