Profile of Janet M. Thornton

摘要

Although many scientific disciplines have experienced vast growth over the past three decades, few may have come as far as bioinformatics. When Janet Thornton, a structural and computational biologist, first began analyzing protein structures in 1973, the structures for only a handful of proteins had been solved, and the genome for even the smallest virus was unknown. Today, the number of solved protein structures has grown to over 30,000, and complete sequences for dozens of organisms have been decoded. "We went from having virtually nothing to having almost the whole biological spectrum of protein types," says Thornton. Director of the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) in Cambridge, England, Thornton has led the charge throughout the bioinformatics boom, especially as it relates to protein structure. In addition to her position at EBI, she is also coordinator of the BioSapiens project, which aims to address the current fragmentation of European bioinformatics by creating a virtual research institute.