Eugene Myers

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Eugene Myers 2014

Eugene "Gene" Wimberly Myers Jr. (born December 31, 1953 in Boise , Idaho ) is an American computer scientist , known for his work in bioinformatics . He was one of the developers of the BLAST program for gene sequencing and contributed significantly to the early completion of the Human Genome Project and other large gene sequencing projects with additional algorithms .

Life

Myers spent his youth in the Far East (Pakistan, India, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Japan) following the places of work of his father, who worked for Exxon .

He studied mathematics at Caltech (Bachelor's degree) and at the University of Colorado at Boulder , where he received his PhD in 1981 under Andrzej Ehrenfeucht ( A Depth-First Characterization of k-Connectivity and Its Application to Connectivity Testing ). During his studies he was also at Bell Laboratories and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado . From 1981 he was an assistant professor at the University of Arizona , where he began to work on algorithms for DNA sequence comparison, from 1999 to 2002 he was vice president for computer science research at Celera Genomics in Rockville (Maryland), which had been founded a year earlier and from 2003 Professor of Computer Science and Molecular Biology at the University of California, Berkeley . He then served as a group leader at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Janelia Farm Research Campus in Loudoun County , Virginia .

From mid-2017 to mid-2019, Myers was "Managing Director" of the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics , at which he has been a director since 2012, and at the same time, as the owner of the Klaus Tschira Chair, head of a new center for Systems Biology in Dresden (English: CSBD), which is developed by the MPI-CBG and the MPI for Physics Complex Systems together with the TU Dresden and funded by the Klaus Tschira Foundation Heidelberg.

Scientific work

Myers and Stephen Altschul and others developed the BLAST program, which is widely used in sequence analysis, in the late 1980s. Their publication is one of the most cited works of the 1990s, the BLAST program is used daily by scientists who compare DNA sequences with the sequences stored in the publicly accessible databases of the major genome sequencing projects.

At Celera Genomics, Myers was involved in the development of algorithms (Whole Genome Shotgun Sequencing Protocol) that made it possible to assemble the 3 billion base pair long human genome from small snippets and enabled the early completion (years before the originally expected date) of the Human Genome Project . At the same time, this also succeeded on the part of public research thanks to advances among others by his friend and former fellow student in Colorado David Haussler at the University of California, Santa Cruz , by Eric Lander at MIT and others. The possibility of larger gene sequencing with the method of shotgun sequencing was shown by Craig Venter's group as early as 1995 by sequencing the 1.8 million base pair genome of Haemophilus influenzae . The geneticist Jim Weber and Myers came up with a suggestion to use the method for the Human Genome Project as well and supported it with simulations. This suggestion was initially received very critically, but was given a chance by Craig Venter at Celera in 1998.

Myers was also involved in the Drosophila fruit fly sequencing project (led by Gerald Rubin , Director of the Janelia Research Campus) and that of the mouse. In the years 2005–2012 he worked as a group leader at the Janelia Research Campus on a project in which the computer maps of the brains of flies and mice based on microscopic images are to be automatically and neuroanatomically evaluated as accurately as possible.

With Udi Manber he developed the suffix array data structure. He also created the algorithm in GNU diff .

Awards and memberships

In 2001 he received the ACM Paris Kanellakis Prize . In 2003 he was accepted into the National Academy of Engineering and in 2004 he received the Max Planck Research Award . Myers has been a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina since 2006 and of the European Molecular Biology Organization since 2016 .

Publications

  • with Rita Casiado (Ed.): Algorithms in Bioinformatics. 5th International Workshop, WABI 2005, Mallorca, Spain. Springer Verlag, Berlin / New York City 2009, ISBN 978-3-540-29008-7 .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Portrait of Myers in Neil C. Jones, Pavel Pevzner: An introduction to bioinformatics algorithms. MIT Press, 2004, ISBN 0-262-10106-8 , pp. 333f.
  2. ^ Mathematics Genealogy Project
  3. ^ Board of Directors of the MPI-CBG. Retrieved September 17, 2017 .
  4. ↑ see messages from the Max Planck Society and the homepage of the Center for Systems Biology at mpg.de and mpg-sysbio.de
  5. ↑ To observe means to understand. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung . June 8, 2013, p. 66.
  6. ^ SF Altschul, W. Gish, W. Miller, EW Myers, DJ Lipman: Basic local alignment search tool. In: J Mol Biol. 215, 1990, pp. 403-410.
  7. ↑ Before that, it was thought that this was only practical for gene segments the size of BACs , around 150,000 base pairs, and the strategy was to divide the genome into BACs and sequence them using the shot gun method.
  8. ↑ J. Weber, Gene Myers Whole genome shotgun sequencing. In: Genome Research. Volume 7, 1997, pp. 401-409. First presented in: JC Roach, C. Boysen, K. Wang, L. Hood: Pairwise end sequencing: a unified approach to genomic mapping and sequencing. In: Genomics. Volume 26, 1995, p. 345.
  9. ↑ The story is z. B. in Neil C. Jones, Pavel Pevzner: Introduction to bioinformatics algorithms. 2004, ISBN 0-262-10106-8 , p. 333ff
  10. ↑ Udi Manber, Gene Myers: Suffix arrays: a new method for on-line string searches. In: SIAM Journal on Computing. Volume 22, 1993, pp. 935-948.
  11. ↑ GNU diff Handbook . Reference is made there to Eugene W. Myers An O (ND) Difference Algorithm and its Variations. In: Algorithmica. Volume 1, 1986, pp. 251-266; Gene Myers, Webb Miller: A File Comparison Program. In: Software — Practice and Experience. Volume 15, 1985, pp. 1025-1040.
  12. ↑ Member entry by Prof. Dr. Eugene W. Myers (with picture and CV) at the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina , accessed on July 18, 2016.
personal data
SURNAME Myers, Eugene
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Myers, Eugene W .; Myers, Eugene Wimberly (full name); Myers, Gene
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American computer scientist
DATE OF BIRTH December 31, 1953
PLACE OF BIRTH Boise , Idaho