Alexander George Bateman is a computational biologist and Head of Protein Sequence Resources at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Cambridge, UK. He has led the development of the

Pfam Pfam is a database of protein families that includes their annotations and multiple sequence alignments generated using hidden Markov models. The latest version of Pfam, 37.0, was released in June 2024 and contains 21,979 families. It is cur ...

biological database and introduced the

Rfam Rfam is a database containing information about non-coding RNA (ncRNA) families and other structured RNA elements. It is an annotated, open access database originally developed at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in collaboration with Janel ...

database of

RNA Ribonucleic acid (RNA) is a polymeric molecule that is essential for most biological functions, either by performing the function itself (non-coding RNA) or by forming a template for the production of proteins (messenger RNA). RNA and deoxyrib ...

families. He has also been involved in the use of

Wikipedia Wikipedia is a free content, free Online content, online encyclopedia that is written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and the wiki software MediaWiki. Founded by Jimmy Wales and La ...

for community-based annotation of biological databases.

Education

Bateman received a

Bachelor of Science A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, B.S., B.Sc., SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree that is awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Scienc ...

degree in

Biochemistry Biochemistry, or biological chemistry, is the study of chemical processes within and relating to living organisms. A sub-discipline of both chemistry and biology, biochemistry may be divided into three fields: structural biology, enzymology, a ...

from

Newcastle University Newcastle University (legally the University of Newcastle upon Tyne) is a public research university based in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. It has overseas campuses in Singapore and Malaysia. The university is a red brick university and a mem ...

in 1994. He received his PhD from the

University of Cambridge The University of Cambridge is a Public university, public collegiate university, collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209, the University of Cambridge is the List of oldest universities in continuous operation, wo ...

in 1997, for research supervised by Cyrus Chothia at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) on the evolution of the

immunoglobulin An antibody (Ab) or immunoglobulin (Ig) is a large, Y-shaped protein belonging to the immunoglobulin superfamily which is used by the immune system to identify and neutralize antigens such as pathogenic bacteria, bacteria and viruses, includin ...

protein superfamily A protein superfamily is the largest grouping (clade) of proteins for which common ancestry can be inferred (see homology (biology), homology). Usually this common ancestry is inferred from structural alignment and mechanistic similarity, even if n ...

. During this time, he also worked with

Sean Eddy Sean Roberts Eddy is a professor of molecular and cellular biology and of applied mathematics at Harvard University. Previously he was based at the Janelia Research Campus from 2006 to 2015 in Virginia. His research interests are in bioinformatics ...

to discover novel protein domains using the

HMMER HMMER is a free and commonly used software package for sequence analysis written by Sean Eddy. Its general usage is to identify homologous protein or nucleotide sequences, and to perform sequence alignments. It detects homology by comparing ...

software.

Career and research

In 1997, Bateman joined the

Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute The Wellcome Sanger Institute, previously known as The Sanger Centre and Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, is a non-profit organisation, non-profit British genomics and genetics research institute, primarily funded by the Wellcome Trust. It is l ...

to lead the development of the

biological database. In 2003, he introduced the

database of RNA families. He was also involved in providing protein analysis for the publication of the human genome. As of 2012, he has been Head of Protein Sequence Resources at EMBL-EBI. Bateman has also been involved in promoting the use of Wikipedia within the science community and in particular, community-based annotation of biological databases through Wikipedia, for example, annotation of the Rfam database through WikiProject RNA. Bateman served as Executive Editor of the journal ''

Bioinformatics Bioinformatics () is an interdisciplinary field of science that develops methods and Bioinformatics software, software tools for understanding biological data, especially when the data sets are large and complex. Bioinformatics uses biology, ...

'' from 2004 to 2012 and has also served as Editor of ''

Nucleic Acids Research ''Nucleic Acids Research'' is an open-access peer-reviewed scientific journal published since 1974 by the Oxford University Press. The journal covers research on nucleic acids, such as DNA and RNA, and related work. According to the ''Journal Cita ...

'', ''

Genome Biology ''Genome Biology'' is a peer-reviewed open access scientific journal covering research in genomics. It was established in 2000 and is published by BioMed Central. The chief editor is currently Andrew Cosgrove ( BioMed Central, New York). Abstract ...

'' and '' Current Protocols in Bioinformatics''. In 2014, he was appointed one of the first Honorary Editors of ''Bioinformatics''. As of 2015, Bateman also serves on the ISCB Board of Directors.

Awards and honours

Bateman was awarded the 2010 Benjamin Franklin Award in bioinformatics. He became the third former member of Richard Durbin's lab to win the award, following

and Ewan Birney. Bateman was elected an ISCB Fellow in 2017 by the

International Society for Computational Biology The International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) is a scholarly society for researchers in computational biology and bioinformatics. The society was founded in 1997 to provide a stable financial home for the Intelligent Systems for Mo ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Bateman, Alex 20th-century British biologists 21st-century British biologists Living people British bioinformaticians Computational biologists Fellows of the International Society for Computational Biology Human Genome Project scientists 1972 births