William Pearson (scientist)

Last updated
William R Pearson
Born
William Raymond Pearson
Education
Known for FASTA [3] [4] [5]
Awards AAAS Fellow (2008) [6]
ISCB Fellow (2018) [7]
Scientific career
Fields Computational biology [8]
Institutions University of Virginia
Thesis Studies on the arrangement of repeated sequences in DNA  (1977)
Website fasta.bioch.virginia.edu/wrpearson

William Raymond Pearson is professor of biochemistry and molecular Genetics in the School of Medicine [8] [9] at the University of Virginia. [10] [11] [12] Pearson is best known for the development of the FASTA format.

Contents

Education

Pearson graduated with a BS in chemistry from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He received his PhD in 1977 from Caltech. [2] As a graduate student, he published several papers describing computer programs for analyzing biological data. [13] [14]

Career and research

After his PhD, Pearson did a postdoctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins University. In 1983, he joined the faculty of Biochemistry at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. [10] Immediately after joining the faculty, he collaborated with David J. Lipman at the NIH to write the FASTP program, [4] and later FASTA. [5] Pearson's research interests are in computational biology. [8] He was named an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellow in 2008, and an International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) Fellow in 2018 for outstanding contributions to the fields of computational biology and bioinformatics. [6] [7]

Related Research Articles

In bioinformatics and biochemistry, the FASTA format is a text-based format for representing either nucleotide sequences or amino acid (protein) sequences, in which nucleotides or amino acids are represented using single-letter codes.

FASTA is a DNA and protein sequence alignment software package first described by David J. Lipman and William R. Pearson in 1985. Its legacy is the FASTA format which is now ubiquitous in bioinformatics.

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References

  1. William Pearson's ORCID   0000-0002-0727-3680
  2. 1 2 Pearson, William Raymond (1977). Studies on the arrangement of repeated sequences in DNA (PhD thesis). OCLC   637417263. ProQuest   302832904.
  3. Pearson, William R. (1990). Rapid and sensitive sequence comparison with FASTP and FASTA. Methods in Enzymology. Vol. 183. pp.  63–98. doi:10.1016/0076-6879(90)83007-V. ISBN   9780121820848. ISSN   0076-6879. PMID   2156132. Closed Access logo transparent.svg
  4. 1 2 Lipman, D.; Pearson, W. (1985). "Rapid and sensitive protein similarity searches". Science . 227 (4693): 1435–1441. Bibcode:1985Sci...227.1435L. doi:10.1126/science.2983426. ISSN   0036-8075. PMID   2983426. Closed Access logo transparent.svg
  5. 1 2 Pearson, W. R.; Lipman, D. J. (1988). "Improved tools for biological sequence comparison". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America . 85 (8): 2444–2448. Bibcode:1988PNAS...85.2444P. doi: 10.1073/pnas.85.8.2444 . PMC   280013 . PMID   3162770.
  6. 1 2 Anon (2008). "AAAS fellows". www.aaas.org.
  7. 1 2 Anon (2018). "ISCB Fellows". iscb.org. International Society for Computational Biology.
  8. 1 2 3 William Pearson publications indexed by Google Scholar OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg
  9. "Biochemistry Research - Pearson". fasta.bioch.virginia.edu/wrpearson.
  10. 1 2 "Pearson, William R." med.virginia.edu.
  11. "Biomedical Sciences Graduate Program - William R. Pearson". bims.virginia.edu.
  12. William Pearson publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database. (subscription required)
  13. Garrard, WT; Pearson, WR; Wake, SK; Bonner, J (1974). "Stoichiometry of chromatin proteins". Biochem Biophys Res Comm . 58: 50–57. doi:10.1016/0006-291x(74)90889-4. PMID   4831079.
  14. Pearson, WR; Davidson, EH; Britten, RJ (1977). "A program for least squares analysis of reassociation and hybridization data". Nucleic Acids Res . 4: 1727–1737. doi:10.1093/nar/4.6.1727. PMC   342517 . PMID   896473.