Deanna Church | |
---|---|
Citizenship | United States |
Alma mater | University of California, Irvine |
Known for | Genomics |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Bioinformatics |
Institutions | 10x Genomics National Center for Biotechnology Information |
Doctoral advisor | John J. Wasmuth |
Deanna Church is a scientist working in the areas of bioinformatics and genomics. She is known for her work on the human genome, "making the genome a friendlier place". [1]
Church graduated with a bachelor's degree from the University of Virginia [2] in 1990. She received a doctorate in Genomics from University of California, Irvine in 1997. Church describes her passion for bioinformatics as connected to her enjoyment of problem solving and being in a team that has direct impacts on people's medical care. [3]
Church worked for the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) from 1999 until 2013. [4] While there, she headed NCBI's team in the Genome Reference Consortium, an international group focusing on refining data on the human genome. [2] She was part of the group involved in releasing GRCh38, a build of the human genome that included centromere sequences for the first time. [5]
In 2013, she joined Personalis as Senior Director of Genomics and Content where she worked towards improving bioinformatics for better analysis of the human genome. [3]
In 2016, she joined 10x Genomics as Senior Director of Applications. [6] Church has had over 35 publications in her career. [7]
The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) is part of the United States National Library of Medicine (NLM), a branch of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It is approved and funded by the government of the United States. The NCBI is located in Bethesda, Maryland, and was founded in 1988 through legislation sponsored by US Congressman Claude Pepper.
Computational biology refers to the use of data analysis, mathematical modeling and computational simulations to understand biological systems and relationships. An intersection of computer science, biology, and big data, the field also has foundations in applied mathematics, chemistry, and genetics. It differs from biological computing, a subfield of computer engineering which uses bioengineering to build computers.
Eugene Viktorovich Koonin is a Russian-American biologist and Senior Investigator at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). He is a recognised expert in the field of evolutionary and computational biology.
PubMed is a free search engine accessing primarily the MEDLINE database of references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics. The United States National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health maintain the database as part of the Entrez system of information retrieval.
The completion of the human genome sequencing in the early 2000s was a turning point in genomics research. Scientists have conducted series of research into the activities of genes and the genome as a whole. The human genome contains around 3 billion base pairs nucleotide, and the huge quantity of data created necessitates the development of an accessible tool to explore and interpret this information in order to investigate the genetic basis of disease, evolution, and biological processes. The field of genomics has continued to grow, with new sequencing technologies and computational tool making it easier to study the genome.
David J. Lipman is an American biologist who from 1989 to 2017 was the director of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Institutes of Health. NCBI is the home of GenBank, the U.S. node of the International Sequence Database Consortium, and PubMed, one of the most heavily used sites in the world for the search and retrieval of biomedical information. Lipman is one of the original authors of the BLAST sequence alignment program, and a respected figure in bioinformatics. In 2017, he left NCBI and became Chief Science Officer at Impossible Foods.
Eugene Wimberly "Gene" Myers, Jr. is an American computer scientist and bioinformatician, who is best known for contributing to the early development of the NCBI's BLAST tool for sequence analysis.
The Reference Sequence (RefSeq) database is an open access, annotated and curated collection of publicly available nucleotide sequences and their protein products. RefSeq was first introduced in 2000. This database is built by National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), and, unlike GenBank, provides only a single record for each natural biological molecule for major organisms ranging from viruses to bacteria to eukaryotes.
The Genome Reference Consortium (GRC) is an international collective of academic and research institutes with expertise in genome mapping, sequencing, and informatics, formed to improve the representation of reference genomes. At the time the human reference was initially described, it was clear that some regions were recalcitrant to analysis with existing technology, leaving gaps in the known sequence. The main reason for improving the reference assemblies are that they are the cornerstones upon which all whole genome studies are based.
GeneCards is a database of human genes that provides genomic, proteomic, transcriptomic, genetic and functional information on all known and predicted human genes. It is being developed and maintained by the Crown Human Genome Center at the Weizmann Institute of Science, in collaboration with LifeMap Sciences.
A reference genome is a digital nucleic acid sequence database, assembled by scientists as a representative example of the set of genes in one idealized individual organism of a species. As they are assembled from the sequencing of DNA from a number of individual donors, reference genomes do not accurately represent the set of genes of any single individual organism. Instead a reference provides a haploid mosaic of different DNA sequences from each donor. For example, one the most recent human reference genomes, assembly GRCh38/hg38, is derived from >60 genomic clone libraries. There are reference genomes for multiple species of viruses, bacteria, fungus, plants, and animals. Reference genomes are typically used as a guide on which new genomes are built, enabling them to be assembled much more quickly and cheaply than the initial Human Genome Project. Reference genomes can be accessed online at several locations, using dedicated browsers such as Ensembl or UCSC Genome Browser.
Alicia Yinema Kate Nungarai Oshlack is an Australian bioinformatician and is Co-Head of Computational Biology at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. She is best known for her work developing methods for the analysis of transcriptome data as a measure of gene expression. She has characterized the role of gene expression in human evolution by comparisons of humans, chimpanzees, orangutans, and rhesus macaques, and works collaboratively in data analysis to improve the use of clinical sequencing of RNA samples by RNAseq for human disease diagnosis.
Donna R. Maglott is a staff scientist at the National Center for Biotechnology Information known for her research on large-scale genomics projects, including the mouse genome and development of databases required for genomics research.
Proline-rich protein 30 is a protein in humans that is encoded for by the PRR30 gene. PRR30 is a member in the family of Proline-rich proteins characterized by their intrinsic lack of structure. Copy number variations in the PRR30 gene have been associated with an increased risk for neurofibromatosis.
Mark S. Boguski was an American pathologist specializing in computational analysis and structural biology, He was elected in 2001 to the U.S. National Academy of Medicine, and was a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics.
C16orf82 is a protein that, in humans, is encoded by the C16orf82 gene. C16orf82 encodes a 2285 nucleotide mRNA transcript which is translated into a 154 amino acid protein using a non-AUG (CUG) start codon. The gene has been shown to be largely expressed in the testis, tibial nerve, and the pituitary gland, although expression has been seen throughout a majority of tissue types. The function of C16orf82 is not fully understood by the scientific community.
10x Genomics, Inc. is an American biotechnology company that designs and manufactures gene sequencing technology used in scientific research. It was founded in 2012 by Serge Saxonov, Ben Hindson, and Kevin Ness.
Kim Dixon Pruitt is an American bioinformatician. She is chief of the information engineering branch at the National Center for Biotechnology Information. Pruitt led the development of the RefSeq gene database.
Tyra Gwendolen Wolfsberg is an American bioinformatician. She is the associate director of the bioinformatics and scientific programming core at the National Human Genome Research Institute.