Gary Stormo
Birth nameGary Dean Stormo
Birth date1950 (age 76–77)
Birth placeSouth Dakota, USA[1]
FieldsBioinformatics
Genetics
Molecular biology
WorkplacesUniversity of Colorado Boulder
Washington University in St. Louis
Alma materCalifornia Institute of Technology
University of Colorado Boulder
Thesis urlhttps://www.researchgate.net/publication/36343045_Computer-aided_characterization_of_transnational_initiation_sites_in_e._coli_
Thesis year1981

Gary Stormo (born 1950) is an American geneticist and currently Joseph Erlanger Professor in the Department of Genetics and the Center for Genome Sciences and Systems Biology at Washington University School of Medicine.[2] He is considered one of the pioneers of bioinformatics and genomics.[3][4][5] His research combines experimental and computational approaches in order to identify and predict regulatory sequences in DNA and RNA, and their contributions to the regulatory networks that control gene expression.[2]

Education

Stormo initially majored in physics as an undergraduate at the California Institute of Technology, but switched to biology in his junior year.[1] He received his PhD in molecular biology in 1981 from the University of Colorado at Boulder.[2]

Research

Following his PhD, Stormo stayed at the University of Colorado as a faculty member in the department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology, becoming a professor before moving to Washington University in St. Louis in 1999.[2][3]

Stormo's research combines experimental and computational approaches to understand regulation of gene expression. His experimental work focuses on protein–DNA interactions and their role in gene regulation. His computational work involves analysis of these interactions and developing pattern recognition algorithms to discover regulatory sites in DNA and RNA.

In 1982, Stormo and his colleagues introduced the Position weight matrix (PWM), a now commonly used representation of motifs (patterns) in biological sequences.[6] Consensus sequence had previously been used to represent patterns in biological sequences, but had difficulties in the prediction of new occurrences of these patterns.[7] The first use of PWMs was in the discovery of RNA sites that function as translation initiation sites. The advantages of PWMs over consensus sequences have made PWMs a popular method for representing patterns in biological sequences and an essential component in modern algorithms for motif discovery.[8][9]

He has published over 150 scientific papers.[3]

Roles and honours

Stormo served on the board of directors of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) from 2000 to 2004 and was honoured as an ISCB Fellow in 2010.[10][11] He was elected as a fellow of the American Medical Informatics Association in 2001.[12]

Stormo was Executive Editor of the journal Bioinformatics from 1994 to 1999.[12] In 2014, he was appointed one of the first Honorary Editors of Bioinformatics.[13] Stormo has also served as Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the journal PLOS Computational Biology.[14] He is currently co-editor of the journal Current Protocols in Bioinformatics.[15]

References

  1. ^ Jones, Neil C. & Pevzner, Pavel A. (2004). An introduction to bioinformatics algorithms. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. p. 116. ISBN 978-0-262-10106-6.
  2. ^ "Gary Stormo". ISMB/ECCB 2013. ISCB. Retrieved 16 January 2014.
  3. ^ "Computational and Experimental Approaches to Modeling Gene Regulation @ uncCharlotte". UNC Charlotte Department of Bioinformatics and Genomics. Retrieved 16 January 2014.[dead link]
  4. ^ "Gary Stormo, Member - Scientific Advisory Board - Systems Biology, Gene Network Sciences Inc.". Retrieved 16 January 2014.
  5. ^ "LGRC - Lung Genomics Research Consortium - Mick Correll". www.lung-genomics.org. Archived 5 April 2015 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved 16 January 2014.
  6. ^ Stormo, Gary D.; Schneider, Thomas D.; Gold, Larry; Ehrenfeucht, Andrzej (1982). "Use of the 'Perceptron' algorithm to distinguish translational initiation sites in E. coli". Nucleic Acids Research. 10 (9): 2997–3011. doi:10.1093/nar/10.9.2997. PMC 320670. PMID 7048259
  7. ^ Stormo, G. D. (1 January 2000). "DNA binding sites: representation and discovery". Bioinformatics. 16 (1): 16–23. doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/16.1.16. PMID 10812473
  8. ^ Sinha, S. (27 July 2006). "On counting position weight matrix matches in a sequence, with application to discriminative motif finding". Bioinformatics. 22 (14): e454–e463. doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btl227. PMID 16873507
  9. ^ Xia, Xuhua (2012). "Position Weight Matrix, Gibbs Sampler, and the Associated Significance Tests in Motif Characterization and Prediction". Scientifica. 2012: 1–15. doi:10.6064/2012/917540. PMC 3820676. PMID 24278755
  10. ^ "Past Officers and Board of Directors". www.iscb.org. ISCB. Retrieved 17 January 2014.
  11. ^ "ISCB Fellows". www.iscb.org. ISCB. Archived 28 March 2015 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved 16 January 2014.
  12. ^ "Gary D. Stormo, PhD, FACMI - AMIA". www.amia.org. AMIA. Retrieved 17 January 2014.[dead link]
  13. ^ "15 years of "Bioinformatics"". Bioinformatics. 30 (6): 747. 2014. doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btu076. PMID 24642573
  14. ^ Sansom, Clare; Morrison McKay, B. J.; Bourne, Philip E. (18 July 2008). "ISCB Honors David Haussler and Aviv Regev". PLOS Computational Biology. 4 (7). Bibcode:2008PLSCB...4E0101S. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000101. PMC 2536508. PMID 18795145
  15. ^ Current Protocols in Bioinformatics - Wiley Online Library. Wiley. 2002. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.419.8061. doi:10.1002/0471250953. ISBN 978-0-471-25095-1.