Richard M. Durbin

Richard Durbin

Richard Durbin
Born 30 December 1960 (1960-12-30) (age 51)
Nationality British
Institutions University of Cambridge,
Laboratory of Molecular Biology,
Harvard University,
Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute
Alma mater University of Cambridge
Doctoral advisor John G White
Notable students Ewan Birney, Sean Eddy
Known for bioinformatics and computational biology
Notable awards EMBO member 2009,[1] Mullard Award, Fellow of the Royal Society 2004

Richard Michael Durbin, PhD FRS, born 30 December 1960 (1960-12-30) (age 51), is a computational biologist at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.[2] He was a joint winner of the Mullard Award of the Royal Society in 1994 (for work on the confocal microscope), won the Lord Lloyd of Kilgerran Award of the Foundation for Science and Technology in 2004, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2004.

He graduated from the University of Cambridge in 1982[3] with a first class honours degree in Mathematics and went on to obtain his PhD in 1987 registered at King's College, Cambridge studying the development and organisation of the nervous system of Caenorhabditis elegans[4] whilst working at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge.

Contributions to computational and genomic biology

Durbin's early work included developing the primary instrument software for one of the first X-ray crystallography area detectors [5] and the MRC Biorad confocal microscope, alongside contributions to neural modelling.[6][7]

He then led the informatics for the C. elegans genome project,[8] and alongside Jean Thierry-Mieg developed the genome database AceDB, which evolved into the WormBase web resource. Following this he played an important role in data collection for and interpretation of the human genome sequence.[9]

He has developed numerous methods for computational sequence analysis. These include gene finding (e.g. GeneWise) with Ewan Birney[10] and Hidden Markov models for protein and nucleic acid alignment and matching (e.g. HMMER) with Sean Eddy and Graeme Mitchison. A standard textbook "Biological Sequence Analysis" coauthored with Sean Eddy, Anders Krogh and Graeme Mitchison[11] describes some of this work. Using these methods Durbin worked with colleagues to build a series of important genomic data resources, including the protein family database Pfam,[12] the genome database Ensembl,[13] and the gene family database TreeFam.[14]

More recently Durbin has returned to sequencing and has developed low coverage approaches to population genome sequencing, applied first to yeast,[15][16] and has been one of the leaders in the application of new sequencing technology to study human genome variation.[17][18] Durbin currently co-leads the international 1000 Genomes Project to characterise variation down to 1% allele frequency as a foundation for human genetics.

References

  1. ^ http://www.biochemist.org/society/page.htm?item=37150 EMBO welcomes 66 leading life scientists as members
  2. ^ http://www.sanger.ac.uk/Teams/faculty/durbin/ Richard Durbin Faculty web page
  3. ^ "The BioInformer nr. 1, 1997 -- Interview with Dr. Richard Durbin". Archived from the original on 2011-07-30. http://www.webcitation.org/60XSjCYkh. Retrieved 2011-07-30. 
  4. ^ ftp://ftp.sanger.ac.uk/pub4/theses/durbin/ Studies on the development and organisation of the nervous system of Caenorhabditis elegans
  5. ^ Durbin, R. M.; Burns, R.; Moulai, J.; Metcalf, P.; Freymann, D.; Blum, M.; Anderson, J. E.; Harrison, S. C. et al. (1986). "Protein, DNA, and virus crystallography with a focused imaging proportional counter". Science 232 (4754): 1127–1132. doi:10.1126/science.3704639. PMID 3704639.  edit
  6. ^ Durbin, R.; Willshaw, D. (1987). "An analogue approach to the travelling salesman problem using an elastic net method". Nature 326 (6114): 689–691. doi:10.1038/326689a0. PMID 3561510.  edit
  7. ^ Durbin, R.; Mitchison, G. (1990). "A dimension reduction framework for understanding cortical maps". Nature 343 (6259): 644–647. doi:10.1038/343644a0. PMID 2304536.  edit
  8. ^ c. Elegans Sequencing, C. (1998). "Genome sequence of the nematode C. Elegans: A platform for investigating biology". Science 282 (5396): 2012–2018. doi:10.1126/science.282.5396.2012. PMID 9851916.  edit
  9. ^ Lander, Eric S.; Linton, M. .; Birren, B. .; Nusbaum, C. .; Zody, C. .; Baldwin, J. .; Devon, K. .; Dewar, K. . et al. (Feb 2001). "Initial sequencing and analysis of the human genome". Nature 409 (6822): 860–921. doi:10.1038/35057062. ISSN 0028-0836. PMID 11237011.  edit
  10. ^ Birney, E.; Durbin, R. (2000). "Using GeneWise in the Drosophila annotation experiment". Genome research 10 (4): 547–548. doi:10.1101/gr.10.4.547. PMC 310858. PMID 10779496. http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pmcentrez&artid=310858.  edit
  11. ^ Durbin, Richard M.; Eddy, Sean R.; Krogh, Anders; Mitchison, Graeme (1998), Biological Sequence Analysis: Probabilistic Models of Proteins and Nucleic Acids (1st ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-62971-3, http://www.cambridge.org/gb/knowledge/isbn/item1158701 
  12. ^ Sonnhammer, E. L. L.; Eddy, S. R.; Durbin, R. (1997). "Pfam: A comprehensive database of protein domain families based on seed alignments". Proteins: Structure, Function, and Genetics 28 (3): 405–420. doi:10.1002/(SICI)1097-0134(199707)28:3<405::AID-PROT10>3.0.CO;2-L. PMID 9223186.  edit
  13. ^ Hubbard, T.; Barker, D.; Birney, E.; Cameron, G.; Chen, Y.; Clark, L.; Cox, T.; Cuff, J. et al. (2002). "The Ensembl genome database project". Nucleic Acids Research 30 (1): 38–41. doi:10.1093/nar/30.1.38. PMC 99161. PMID 11752248. http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pmcentrez&artid=99161.  edit
  14. ^ Li, H.; Coghlan, A.; Ruan, J.; Coin, L. J.; Hériché, J. K.; Osmotherly, L.; Li, R.; Liu, T. et al. (2006). "TreeFam: A curated database of phylogenetic trees of animal gene families". Nucleic Acids Research 34 (90001): D572–D580. doi:10.1093/nar/gkj118. PMC 1347480. PMID 16381935. http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pmcentrez&artid=1347480.  edit
  15. ^ Liti, G.; Carter, D. M.; Moses, A. M.; Warringer, J.; Parts, L.; James, S. A.; Davey, R. P.; Roberts, I. N. et al. (2009). "Population genomics of domestic and wild yeasts". Nature 458 (7236): 337–341. doi:10.1038/nature07743. PMC 2659681. PMID 19212322. http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pmcentrez&artid=2659681.  edit
  16. ^ Warringer, J.; Zörgö, E.; Cubillos, F. A.; Zia, A.; Gjuvsland, A.; Simpson, J. T.; Forsmark, A.; Durbin, R. et al. (2011). "Trait variation in yeast is defined by population history". PLoS genetics 7 (6): e1002111. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1002111. PMC 3116910. PMID 21698134. http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pmcentrez&artid=3116910.  edit
  17. ^ Bentley, D. R.; Balasubramanian, S.; Swerdlow, H. P.; Smith, G. P.; Milton, J.; Brown, C. G.; Hall, K. P.; Evers, D. J. et al. (2008). "Accurate whole human genome sequencing using reversible terminator chemistry". Nature 456 (7218): 53–59. doi:10.1038/nature07517. PMC 2581791. PMID 18987734. http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pmcentrez&artid=2581791.  edit
  18. ^ Li, H.; Durbin, R. (2011). "Inference of human population history from individual whole-genome sequences". Nature 475 (7357): 493–496. doi:10.1038/nature10231. PMID 21753753.  edit

External links