On the trail of protein sequences

On the trail of protein sequences

Abstract

Center for Molecular Genetics, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0634, USA; E-mail: rdoolittle@ucsd.edu Introduction I was somewhat taken aback when asked to write an article for a History issue of Bioinformatics, because not by any stretch of the imagination am I a ‘bioinformaticist’. I have no formal training in computer or information science. By education, I am a biochemist whose early experience was in the area of proteins. Bioinformatics was not a term that existed when I began my scientific career. My introduction to computers came about from an interest in biochemical evolution, a subject that first fascinated me many years ago when I was a graduate student. The laboratory in which I did my graduate training was working on blood proteins—especially those involved in blood coagulation—and a number of chance factors led me to inquire how this quite complicated process could ever have evolved. Blood clotting in humans was known to depend on the coordinate interplay of a dozen or more protein factors. This was a period when the notion of one gene–one polypeptide chain was beginning to be generally accepted, and it seemed unlikely to me that the entire melange could have evolved