Dr Alex Bateman

Alex's goal is to classify all protein and RNA sequences into families to better understand their function and evolution.

Alex graduated from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in 1994 with a BSc in Biochemistry. He earned his PhD at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, in the group of Cyrus Chothia studying the evolution of the sequence and structure of the immunoglobulin superfamily. He also worked closely with Sean Eddy using the HMMER software to identify novel protein domains.

In 1997, Alex moved to the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute to lead the Pfam database project. His scientific goal is "to completely and accurately classify protein domains and non-coding RNAs". The Pfam database now contains over 12,000 entries and represents a world-leading resource. During 1998 he led the team of researchers who provided the protein analysis for the publication of the human genome. In 2003 he founded the Rfam database of non-coding RNAs that provides annotation and models for hundreds of RNA families.

Since 2003, Alex has taken on a number of Journal editing responsibilities. He was the Executive Editor for the Nucleic Acids Research Database Issue from 2004 to 2008 and still serves on the Editorial Board. He has been the Executive Editor for Bioinformatics since 2004. In 2007, Alex became the Director of Graduate Studies responsible for PhD studies at the Sanger Institute.

Selected Publications

• Pfam 10 years on: 10,000 families and still growing.

  Sammut SJ, Finn RD and Bateman A

  Briefings in bioinformatics2008;9;3;210-9

  PUBMED: 18344544; DOI: 10.1093/bib/bbn010

• MEROPS: the peptidase database.

  Rawlings ND, Morton FR, Kok CY, Kong J and Barrett AJ

  Nucleic acids research2008;36;Database issue;D320-5

  PUBMED: 17991683; PMC: 2238837; DOI: 10.1093/nar/gkm954

• The Pfam protein families database.

  Finn RD, Tate J, Mistry J, Coggill PC, Sammut SJ, Hotz HR, Ceric G, Forslund K, Eddy SR, Sonnhammer EL and Bateman A

  Nucleic acids research2008;36;Database issue;D281-8

  PUBMED: 18039703; PMC: 2238907; DOI: 10.1093/nar/gkm960

• Protein interactions in human genetic diseases.

  Schuster-Böckler B and Bateman A

  Genome biology2008;9;1;R9

  PUBMED: 18199329; PMC: 2395246; DOI: 10.1186/gb-2008-9-1-r9

• SCOOP: a simple method for identification of novel protein superfamily relationships.

  Bateman A and Finn RD

  Bioinformatics (Oxford, England)2007;23;7;809-14

  PUBMED: 17277330; PMC: 2603044; DOI: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btm034

• New developments in the InterPro database.

  Mulder NJ, Apweiler R, Attwood TK, Bairoch A, Bateman A, Binns D, Bork P, Buillard V, Cerutti L, Copley R, Courcelle E, Das U, Daugherty L, Dibley M, Finn R, Fleischmann W, Gough J, Haft D, Hulo N, Hunter S, Kahn D, Kanapin A, Kejariwal A, Labarga A, Langendijk-Genevaux PS, Lonsdale D, Lopez R, Letunic I, Madera M, Maslen J, McAnulla C, McDowall J, Mistry J, Mitchell A, Nikolskaya AN, Orchard S, Orengo C, Petryszak R, Selengut JD, Sigrist CJ, Thomas PD, Valentin F, Wilson D, Wu CH and Yeats C

  Nucleic acids research2007;35;Database issue;D224-8

  PUBMED: 17202162; PMC: 1899100; DOI: 10.1093/nar/gkl841

• The G5 domain: a potential N-acetylglucosamine recognition domain involved in biofilm formation.

  Bateman A, Holden MT and Yeats C

  Bioinformatics (Oxford, England)2005;21;8;1301-3

  PUBMED: 15598841; DOI: 10.1093/bioinformatics/bti206

• Rfam: annotating non-coding RNAs in complete genomes.

  Griffiths-Jones S, Moxon S, Marshall M, Khanna A, Eddy SR and Bateman A

  Nucleic acids research2005;33;Database issue;D121-4

  PUBMED: 15608160; PMC: 540035; DOI: 10.1093/nar/gki081

• The Hotdog fold: wrapping up a superfamily of thioesterases and dehydratases.

  Dillon SC and Bateman A

  BMC bioinformatics2004;5;109

  PUBMED: 15307895; PMC: 516016; DOI: 10.1186/1471-2105-5-109