Future: bioinformatics

Dr. Cyrus Chothia is Emeritus group leader, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Structural Studies Division, in Cambridge, U.K.

Dr. Chothia pioneered the understanding of the relationships between protein sequence and protein structure, function, and interactions. An important step was the classification of all known protein structures, which revealed the widespread occurrence of substructures, or “folds.” This finding allowed the prediction of both protein structure and, in some cases, protein function as well. Dr. Chothia applied his understanding of protein structure to the analysis of genome sequences. He discovered the roles of gene duplication and recombination of structural domains in protein evolution. Dr. Chothia, together with his students and fellows, has established the fundamental basis for much of structural bioinformatics.

Dr. Chothia is a Member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (1988), a Fellow of the Royal Society (2000) and Senior Research Fellow, Wolfson College, University of Cambridge (2003).