Elisabeth Gasteiger is a Swiss bioinformatician known for her work in developing and managing tools for protein analysis. Her efforts have been instrumental in advancing

proteomics Proteomics is the large-scale study of proteins. Proteins are vital macromolecules of all living organisms, with many functions such as the formation of structural fibers of muscle tissue, enzymatic digestion of food, or synthesis and replicatio ...

research, particularly through her contributions to the ExPASy (Expert Protein Analysis System), a bioinformatics resource platform. She currently holds the position of Senior User Experience and Support Manager at the

Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics The SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics is an academic not-for-profit foundation which federates bioinformatics activities throughout Switzerland. The institute was established on 30 March 1998 and its mission is to provide core bioinform ...

(SIB).

Career

Gasteiger's work at the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB) has been instrumental in the development and enhancement of key bioinformatics resources, including the

UniProt UniProt is a freely accessible database of protein sequence and functional information, many entries being derived from genome sequencing projects. It contains a large amount of information about the biological function of proteins derived fro ...

database, an integrated platform that combines protein sequence data from Swiss-Prot, TrEMBL, and PIR, as well as the ExPASy platform, which provides a suite of tools to support protein sequence analysis and related research. She has played a pivotal role in the development and enhancement of the ExPASy (Expert Protein Analysis System) platform, coordinating software development within the Swiss-Prot group at SIB and overseeing the ExPASy server. One of her notable contributions is the development of ProtParam, a tool hosted on the ExPASy server that allows researchers to compute various physical and chemical parameters of a protein sequence, such as its molecular weight, theoretical pI, amino acid composition, and extinction coefficient. In her role as User Experience & Support Manager with the Swiss-Prot Group at SIB, she contributed to the deployment of the Cellosaurus database on the ExPASy platform in May 2015, significantly enhancing its development as a standalone resource for life sciences research. She has also contributed to other bioinformatics resources, including the creation of the ABCD database, a repository for chemically defined antibodies, which serves as a valuable resource for researchers in the field of immunology. Additionally, she has been associated with the development of the Glycomics@ExPASy platform, which aims to bridge the gap in glycomics research by providing access to a variety of databases and tools dedicated to the study of glycans and glycoproteins. Her ongoing work has contributed to the success of UniProt as a leading resource for protein sequence classification, annotation, and functional analysis, supporting researchers worldwide in molecular biology,

genomics Genomics is an interdisciplinary field of molecular biology focusing on the structure, function, evolution, mapping, and editing of genomes. A genome is an organism's complete set of DNA, including all of its genes as well as its hierarchical, ...

, and proteomics. She has been instrumental in providing critical support to researchers by developing and managing bioinformatics tools that improve the accessibility and accuracy of protein sequence data. In 2024, she contributed to a research initiative in collaboration with Ottokar Stundner and other clinician scientists, which was awarded the Weiss Research Prize. This project, supported by the Weiss-Wissenschaftsstiftung and the

Austrian Science Fund The Austrian Science Fund () is the most important Austrian funding organization for basic research. The FWF supports research in science, engineering, and the humanities through a large variety of grant programmes, prizes and by funding infrastru ...

(FWF), aims to improve the safety of anesthetic procedures by investigating the risks associated with crystal formation in anesthetic mixtures.

Selected publications

* Gasteiger, E., Hoogland, C., Gattiker, A., Duvaud, S., Wilkins, M. R., Appel, R. D., Bairoch, A. (2003). "ExPASy: SIB bioinformatics resource portal." ''Nucleic Acids Research'', 31(13), 3787–3793. doi:10.1093/nar/gkg557. * Gasteiger, E., Hoogland, C., Gattiker, A., Duvaud, S., Wilkins, M. R., Appel, R. D., Bairoch, A. (2005). "Protein identification and analysis tools on the ExPASy server." In: Walker, J. M. (ed.), ''The Proteomics Protocols Handbook'', pp. 571–607. Humana Press. doi:10.1385/1-59259-890-0:571. * Gasteiger, E., Jung, E., Bairoch, A. (2001). "The SWISS-PROT protein sequence database and its applications in proteomics." ''Bioinformatics'', 17(2), 305–306. doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/17.2.305. * Boeckmann, B., Bairoch, A., Apweiler, R., Blatter, M. C., Estreicher, A., Gasteiger, E., et al. (2003). "The SWISS-PROT protein knowledgebase and its applications to proteomics." ''Bioinformatics'', 19(2), 1–10. doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/19.2.1. * Gasteiger, E., UniProt Consortium. (2001). "UniProt: The universal protein knowledgebase." ''Nucleic Acids Research'', 46(D1), D136–D139. doi:10.1093/nar/gkx1098. * Gasteiger, E., UniProt Consortium. (2009). "The protein knowledgebase: UniProt and its applications." ''Bioinformatics'', 25(11), 1626–1637. doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btp183.

References

Bioinformatics Proteomics Swiss women scientists Year of birth missing (living people) Living people {{Improve categories, date=January 2025