| I have a masters in computational biology. I did some work on flux balance analysis (FBA), which is a pretty interesting topic. FBA simulates the metabolic system using linear programming, which is a technique used most extensively in economics, but applicable to biology. Basically, linear programming is a mathematical method of determining the maximization of some linear function given a set of linear contraints. The assumption behind applying FBA to metabolic systems is that the cell acts to maximize its growth based on what is available in the environment and the stoichiometry of the metabolic reactions that can occur in the cell (ie the constraints of the system). It is suprisingly accurate at predicting things like the consequences of metabolic gene knockouts, and has been applied to identify potential drug targets. The most renowned researcher is this area is Bernhard. O. Palsson. His group[1] has created computational models of different organism that can be used to perform FBA and test things such as, for example, the outcome of gene knockouts. His models are available to download. There are linear programming libraries available for linux. I used lpsolve, which has Python bindings. As a starter project you could do something like identify the essential genes in a organism like E. coli. I'd be happy to help. My homepage (in my profile) has my email address. [1] http://gcrg.ucsd.edu/ |