Steven Henikoff

Last updated
Steven Henikoff
Alma mater
Known for BLOSUM
SpouseJorja Henikoff
Scientific career
Fields biochemistry
Institutions

Steven Henikoff is a scientist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and an HHMI Investigator. [1] His field of study is chromatin-related transcriptional regulation. [2] He earned his BS in chemistry at the University of Chicago. He earned his PhD in biochemistry and molecular biology from Harvard University in the lab of Matt Meselson in 1977. He did a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Washington. [3] His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and HHMI. In 1992, Steven Henikoff, together with his wife Jorja Henikoff, introduced the BLOSUM substitution matrices. [4] The BLOSUM matrices are widely used for sequence alignment of proteins. [5] In 2005, Henikoff was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. [6]

Related Research Articles

In bioinformatics and evolutionary biology, a substitution matrix describes the frequency at which a character in a nucleotide sequence or a protein sequence changes to other character states over evolutionary time. The information is often in the form of log odds of finding two specific character states aligned and depends on the assumed number of evolutionary changes or sequence dissimilarity between compared sequences. It is an application of a stochastic matrix. Substitution matrices are usually seen in the context of amino acid or DNA sequence alignments, where they are used to calculate similarity scores between the aligned sequences.

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References

  1. "HENIKOFF LAB". research.fhcrc.org.
  2. "Steven Henikoff".
  3. "Steven Henikoff - Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center Researcher Profiles Arnold Library and Shared Resources". sharedresources.fredhutch.org.
  4. Henikoff, S.; Henikoff, J.G. (1992). "Amino Acid Substitution Matrices from Protein Blocks". PNAS. 89 (22): 10915–10919. Bibcode:1992PNAS...8910915H. doi: 10.1073/pnas.89.22.10915 . PMC   50453 . PMID   1438297.
  5. Azar, B. (2007). "Profile of Steven Henikoff". PNAS. 104 (50): 19665–19667. Bibcode:2007PNAS..10419665A. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0710322104 . PMC   2148353 . PMID   18077398.
  6. "Steve Henikoff, geneticist and inventor". Fred Hutch. Archived from the original on 2018-12-24. Retrieved 2016-11-21.