During discussions at the International Mathematica User Conference 2009 with bioinformaticians using Mathematica, I learned a lot of very important things---like why protein folding isn't something you can order at the dry cleaner. I also learned that a lot of people seriously dig Mathematica's modeling and automatic interface construction capabilities, which make it easy for them to create interactive applications and simulations. Whether it is protein structure prediction using comparative modeling and fold recognition, or visualizing large-scale sequence alignments, Mathematica makes it fast and accurate. To make it easy for you to check out Mathematica's capabilities for this field, we have designed the Mathematica Solution for Bioinformatics portal. This website, which I researched and created, highlights Mathematica's capabilities and features several case studies, articles, and tutorials to help you get started. One of the cool things I enjoyed researching were the interactive Demonstrations. If you are like me and learn best by looking at an example, there's no better resource for learning how to create interactive applications in Mathematica, because the code used for creating the application is freely available right there.

The global H1N1 outbreak has researchers stepping up their efforts to build a mathematical model that health authorities can use to identify optimal medication strategies for emerging infectious diseases. Zhilan Feng, a mathematics professor at Purdue University, is one of those researchers. Feng, who's collaborating with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), is using Mathematica to develop and analyze a model of the dynamics and medication control of influenza. In this video, she demonstrates why Mathematica is the perfect tool for their work.