Steven Henikoff | |
---|---|
Alma mater | |
Known for | BLOSUM |
Spouse | Jorja 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]
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.
Leland Harrison (Lee) Hartwell is former president and director of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington. He shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Paul Nurse and Tim Hunt, for their discoveries of protein molecules that control the division (duplication) of cells.
Robert G. Roeder is an American biochemist. He is known as a pioneer scientist in eukaryotic transcription. He discovered three distinct nuclear RNA polymerases in 1969 and characterized many proteins involved in the regulation of transcription, including basic transcription factors and the first mammalian gene-specific activator over five decades of research. He is the recipient of the Gairdner Foundation International Award in 2000, the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 2003, and the Kyoto Prize in 2021. He currently serves as Arnold and Mabel Beckman Professor and Head of the Laboratory of Biochemical and Molecular Biology at The Rockefeller University.
Randy Wayne Schekman is an American cell biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, former editor-in-chief of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and former editor of Annual Review of Cell and Developmental Biology. In 2011, he was announced as the editor of eLife, a new high-profile open-access journal published by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society and the Wellcome Trust launching in 2012. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1992. Schekman shared the 2013 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with James Rothman and Thomas C. Südhof for their ground-breaking work on cell membrane vesicle trafficking.
A point accepted mutation — also known as a PAM — is the replacement of a single amino acid in the primary structure of a protein with another single amino acid, which is accepted by the processes of natural selection. This definition does not include all point mutations in the DNA of an organism. In particular, silent mutations are not point accepted mutations, nor are mutations that are lethal or that are rejected by natural selection in other ways.
Abraham Adrian Albert was an American mathematician. In 1939, he received the American Mathematical Society's Cole Prize in Algebra for his work on Riemann matrices. He is best known for his work on the Albert–Brauer–Hasse–Noether theorem on finite-dimensional division algebras over number fields and as the developer of Albert algebras, which are also known as exceptional Jordan algebras.
In bioinformatics, the BLOSUM matrix is a substitution matrix used for sequence alignment of proteins. BLOSUM matrices are used to score alignments between evolutionarily divergent protein sequences. They are based on local alignments. BLOSUM matrices were first introduced in a paper by Steven Henikoff and Jorja Henikoff. They scanned the BLOCKS database for very conserved regions of protein families and then counted the relative frequencies of amino acids and their substitution probabilities. Then, they calculated a log-odds score for each of the 210 possible substitution pairs of the 20 standard amino acids. All BLOSUM matrices are based on observed alignments; they are not extrapolated from comparisons of closely related proteins like the PAM Matrices.
David S. Eisenberg is an American biochemist and biophysicist best known for his contributions to structural biology and computational molecular biology. He has been a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles since the early 1970s and was director of the UCLA-DOE Institute for Genomics & Proteomics, as well as a member of the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) at UCLA.
Nahum Sonenberg, is an Israeli Canadian microbiologist and biochemist. He is a James McGill professor of biochemistry at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He was an HHMI international research scholar from 1997 to 2011 and is now a senior international research scholar. He is best known for his seminal contributions to our understanding of translation, and notable for the discovery of the mRNA 5' cap-binding protein, eIF4E, the rate-limiting component of the eukaryotic translation apparatus.
Virginia Zakian is the Harry C. Wiess Professor in the Life Sciences in the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University. She is the director of the Zakian Lab, which has done important research in topics such as telomere-binding protein, telomere recombination, and telomere position effects, at Princeton University. She is a fellow at the American Academy of Microbiology and the American Association for the Advancement of Science., and is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences (2018). Zakian served as the chair of "Princeton's Task force on the Status of Women Faculty in the Natural Sciences and Engineering at Princeton" from 2001-2003, in 2003 Zakian became Princeton University's representative to Nine Universities, Gender Equity Analysis She was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019.
Joseph S. Takahashi is a Japanese American neurobiologist and geneticist. Takahashi is a professor at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center as well as an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Takahashi's research group discovered the genetic basis for the mammalian circadian clock in 1994 and identified the Clock gene in 1997. Takahashi was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2003.
Daniel Herschlag is an American biochemist and Professor of Biochemistry at the Stanford University School of Medicine. His research uses an interdisciplinary approach to advance our understanding of the fundamental behavior of RNA and proteins. He is well known for his application of rigorous kinetic and mechanistic approaches to RNA and protein systems.
José Nelson Onuchic is a Brazilian and American physicist, the Harry C & Olga K Wiess Professor of Physics at Rice University. He does research in molecular biophysics, condensed matter chemistry, and genetic networks, and is known for the folding funnel hypothesis stating that the native state of a protein is a deep minimum of free energy for the protein's natural conditions among its possible configurations. He was the college master for Lovett College at Rice University from 2014 to 2019.
Harold M. "Hal" Weintraub was an American scientist who lived from 1945 until his death in 1995 from an aggressive brain tumor. Only 49 years old, Weintraub left behind a legacy of research.
Raghavan Varadarajan is an Indian biophysicist and a professor at the Indian Institute of Science. He is known for his researches in the fields of protein structure and protein folding and his contributions in developing vaccines and drugs for treating a type of fatal influenza and HIV-1. He is a former J. C. Bose National Fellow of the Department of Science and Technology and an elected fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences and the Indian National Science Academy. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of the highest Indian science awards, in 2002, for his contributions to biological sciences.
Scott William Lowe is Chair of the Cancer Biology and Genetics Program in the Sloan Kettering Institute at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. He is recognized for his research on the tumor suppressor gene, p53, which is mutated in nearly half of cancers.
Jonathan Solomon Stamler is an English-born American physician and scientist. He is known for his discovery of protein S-nitrosylation, the addition of a nitric oxide (NO) group to cysteine residues in proteins, as a ubiquitous cellular signal to regulate enzymatic activity and other key protein functions in bacteria, plants and animals, and particularly in transporting NO on cysteines in hemoglobin as the third gas in the respiratory cycle.
Channing Joseph Der is an American scientist and educator, and Sarah Graham Kenan Distinguished Professor of Pharmacology, at UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. Der is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, He is recognized for his work with the Ras oncoprotein and its role in human oncogenesis.
Harmit Singh Malik is an Indian American evolutionary biologist who is a professor and associate director at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. He was awarded the 2022 Genetics Society of America Edward Novitski Prize.
David Schlessinger is a Canadian-born American biochemist, microbiologist, and geneticist. He is known for his directorship of the development of the map of the X chromosome.