Microsoft Research and Italy’s University of Trento are setting up a new research centre to look at how the interaction of software and biological systems can help improve both fields.

Researchers will work on creating new software tools so that biologists and life sciences experts can better understand complex processes in biological systems.

The aim is for this knowledge to help in the development of new ways of building software.

‘Apart from developing new drugs, defining new functionalities of genes or new ways of curing disease, we are also looking at new ways of defining software,’ said Corrado Priami, the research centre’s president.

‘The idea is that biological systems are robust and fault-tolerant, much more so than computer systems are today.

‘So learning how these biological systems work should be a way of defining new computational paradigms or programming languages, and new ways of improving security, fault tolerance and quality of software.’

The announcement is the first step in Microsoft’s plans to expand its presence in basic science research by establishing closer collaboration with the European science community.

The vendor is expected to announce similar initiatives in the UK and Europe over the next two years.

‘We are looking at how consequent advances in science are likely to form the building blocks of a new revolution in computing and entirely novel computing architectures,’ said Stephen Emmott, director of the external research office at Microsoft Research Cambridge.

‘With three-and-a-half billion years of its own research and development, nature has found some really elegant solutions to deal with some problems that computing is increasingly facing, such as highly complex systems that can recover easily, are resistant to viruses and heal themselves.’

Emmott says that major science breakthroughs in the past decade, such as the mapping of the human genome, have been fuelled by advances in computing hardware.

Now, with massive computing power widely available, he believes new innovations will be driven by software in the decades ahead.

Microsoft’s European science initiative was unveiled in February by chairman Bill Gates, with a focus on accelerating innovation and advances at the interaction of science and computing.