About Us

In BioNumbers we aim to enable you to find in one minute any common biological number that can be important for your research. The BioNumbers database was started by Ron Milo, Paul Jorgensen and Mike Springer at the Systems Biology department in Harvard . It was inspired by a comparison of values of key properties in bacteria, yeast and a mammalian cell line in Uri Alon’s book – “Introduction to systems biology” . We thought it would be great to have this available for many biological properties and with full reference. An initial version was set up in May 2007, seeded with values about e.coli from the CyberCell Project at the university of Alberta, Canada. The current database format was designed and implemented by Griffin Weber, CTO for information technology at Harvard medical school. The full version was programmed and is being developed by Zaztech . he bioNumbers logo was designed by Ricardo Vidal from the University of Algarve, Portugal (now at MIT). It is our hope that the database will facilitate quantitative analysis and reasoning in a field of research where numbers tend to be “soft” and difficult to vouch for. Financial as well as moral support for the effort is being given by the Systems biology department in Harvard. Many users are helping us expand the database. We would love to have you involved in bioNumbers. Feel free to write us a note at bioNumbers@gmail.com