Cyrus Chothia

Cyrus Chothia FRS is an emeritus scientist at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB)^[5][6] and emeritus fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge.^[4][7]

After his Ph.D. research under Peter Pauling^[8] at University College London, Chothia worked in the LMB for three years. He then worked for Michael Levitt at the Weizmann Institute of Science ^[9][10] followed by two years with Joel Janin at the Institut Pasteur in Paris.^[11]

In 1976 Chothia returned to England to work at University College London and the LMB. With Arthur M. Lesk^[12][13] he showed that proteins adapt to mutations by changes in structure.

In 1992 he proposed that most proteins are built of domains that come from a small number of families. He collaborated with Alexey Murzin, Steven E. Brenner and Tim Hubbard to create the Structural Classification of Proteins (SCOP) database,^[14][15] a periodic table for all known protein structures. With Julian Gough^[2] to create the SUPERFAMILY database^[16] which uses Hidden Markov models to identify protein sequences that are related to those of known structures.

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