Margaret Oakley Dayhoff

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

Life and work

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

After studying the electrochemistry at Rockefeller University until 1951 Margaret Oakley Dayhoff was initially a research position at the University of Maryland ( 1957-1959 ) and then professor of physiology and biophysics at Georgetown University ( " Georgetown University Medical Center" ). Since 1955, she was able to work with a computer system and developed programs which compared the amino acid sequences of homologous proteins from different species, and thus laid the foundation of Sequenzalignierung. Since 1965, the "Atlas of Protein Sequence and Structure " was released, a compilation of all previously known protein sequences. The data were from 1984 Information Resource database incorporated into the protein, which resulted in the UniProt database 2002. In 1966 Margaret Dayhoff developed the PAM model that attempts to determine the probability of a change in a protein sequence.

On February 5, 1983 Margaret Oakley Dayhoff died 57 years old of a heart attack.