Margaret Oakley Dayhoff

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Margaret Belle Oakley Dayhoff (born March 11, 1925 in Philadelphia , † February 5, 1983 in Silver Springs (Maryland) ) was an American scientist. She worked in the fields of physical chemistry and sequence analysis of proteins and DNA and founded bioinformatics .

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Margaret Belle Oakley was born in Philadelphia on March 11, 1925, the only child of Kenneth Oakley and Ruth Clark. When the daughter was ten, the family moved to New York City , where Margaret attended public schools. She graduated from Bayside High School as "Prima Omnium" . She then received a scholarship to study mathematics at Washington Square College, private New York University . 1945 Margaret Oakley graduated with "Magna Cum Laude"; three years later she received a Ph.D. from Columbia University in quantum chemistry . In her doctoral thesis, she addressed the use of computer systems for mass data processing in theoretical chemistry. Also in 1948 Margaret Oakley married the physicist Edward Dayhoff.

After studying electrochemistry at Rockefeller University until 1951, Margaret Oakley Dayhoff first received a research position at the University of Maryland (1957-1959) and then a professorship in physiology and biophysics at Georgetown University ("Georgetown University Medical Center"). Since 1955 she was able to work with a computer system and developed programs that compared the amino acid sequences of homologous proteins from different species and thus created the basis for sequence alignment . Since 1965 the "Atlas of Protein Sequence and Structure" was published, a compilation of all previously known protein sequences. The data was taken over into the Protein Information Resource database from 1984 , which was incorporated into the UniProt database in 2002 . From 1966 Margaret Dayhoff developed the PAM model , which tries to determine the probability of a change in a protein sequence.

Margaret Oakley Dayhoff died on February 5, 1983 at the age of 57 of a heart attack.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Laura Lynn Windsor: Women in medicine: an encyclopedia. ABC-CLIO, 2002, ISBN 1-57607-392-0 , p. 57.
  2. ↑ Margaret Oakley Dayhoff 1925-1983. In: Bulletin of Mathematical Biology , Springer New York, Vol. 46, Number 4, July 1984, pp. 467-472; doi: 10.1007 / BF02459497
  3. ↑ Martina McGloughlin, Edward Re: The evolution of biotechnology: from Natufians to nanotechnology. Springer, 2006, ISBN 1-4020-5148-4 , p. 100.
  4. ↑ MO Dayhoff, R. Schwartz, BC Orcutt: A model of Evolutionary Change in Proteins. In: Atlas of protein sequence and structure , 5th edition, 3rd supplementary volume, 1978, Nat. Biomed. Res. Found., ISBN 0-912466-07-3 , pp. 345-358.
personal data
SURNAME Dayhoff, Margaret Oakley
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Dayhoff, Margaret Belle
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American biochemist
DATE OF BIRTH March 11, 1925
PLACE OF BIRTH Philadelphia
DATE OF DEATH 5th February 1983
Place of death Silver Springs, Maryland