Eugene Myers

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

Life

Myers spent his youth in the Far East (Pakistan, India, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Japan) according to the places of work of his father, who worked for Exxon. He studied mathematics at Caltech ( bachelor's degree ) and the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he received his doctorate in 1981 at 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 at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder (Colorado). From 1981 he was assistant professor at the University of Arizona, where he began to deal with algorithms for DNA sequence comparison, from 1999 to 2002 he was Vice President for computer science research at the founded a year earlier Celera Genomics in Rockville ( Maryland) and from 2003 professor of computer science and molecular biology at the University of California, Berkeley. After that, he was group leader at the Janelia Farm Research Campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute ( HHMI ) in Loudoun County, Virginia. Since mid-2012, Myers is one of the directors of the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics and at the same time as the owner of Klaus Tschira Chairs director of a new Center for Systems Biology in Dresden, which the MPI complex from the MPI -CBG and physics systems built together with the Technical University of Dresden and is funded by the Klaus Tschira Foundation Heidelberg.

Theses

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

At Celera Genomics Myers was involved in the development of algorithms ( Whole Genome Shutgun Sequencing Protocol), which enabled the composition of the 3 billion base pairs long human genome consists of small snippets and enabled the early completion ( years before the previously expected date ) of the Human Genome Project. At the same time this was successfully managed by the public research thanks to advances among others of his friend and former fellow student in Colorado David Haussler at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Eric Lander at MIT and others. The possibility of larger gene sequencing, the group had to Craig Venter in 1995 shown with the sequencing of the full 1.8 million base pairs Haemophilus influenzae gene with the shot gun method. The geneticist Jim Weber and Myers developed a proposal to use the method for the Human Genome Project and underpinned it with simulations, but was initially well received critically, but received from Craig Venter at Celera in 1998 a chance.

Myers was also the sequencing project of the Drosophila fruit fly ( by Gerald Rubin, director of the Janelia Farm labs, directed ) and involved in the mouse. In 2010, he worked in the lab of Janelia Farm on a project in which the micrographs based computer maps of the brains of flies and mice accurately as possible and to be automated neuroanatomically evaluated.

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

Awards and Affiliations

In 2001 he received the Paris Kanellakis Award of the ACM. In 2003, he was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering and in 2004 he received the Max Planck Research Award. Myers is 2006 Member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina since.

Publications

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