Monica Riley (1926 – October 11, 2013) was an American scientist who contributed to the discovery of

messenger RNA In molecular biology, messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) is a single-stranded molecule of RNA that corresponds to the genetic sequence of a gene, and is read by a ribosome in the process of synthesizing a protein. mRNA is created during the ...

in her Ph.D work with

Arthur Pardee Arthur Beck Pardee (July 13, 1921 – February 24, 2019) was an American biochemist. One biographical portrait begins "Among the titans of science, Arthur Pardee is especially intriguing." There is hardly a field of molecular biology that is not ...

, and was later a pioneer in the exploration and computer representation of the ''

Escherichia coli ''Escherichia coli'' ( )Wells, J. C. (2000) Longman Pronunciation Dictionary. Harlow ngland Pearson Education Ltd. is a gram-negative, facultative anaerobic, rod-shaped, coliform bacterium of the genus '' Escherichia'' that is commonly fo ...

'' genome.

Career

After graduating from

Smith College Smith College is a Private university, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts Women's colleges in the United States, women's college in Northampton, Massachusetts, United States. It was chartered in 1871 by Sophia Smit ...

with a chemistry degree in 1947, she studied Biochemistry at

University of California Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after the Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkeley ...

with Pardee. Her Ph.D. work, together with the PaJaMo experiment, ruled out

ribosomes Ribosomes () are macromolecular machines, found within all cells, that perform biological protein synthesis (messenger RNA translation). Ribosomes link amino acids together in the order specified by the codons of messenger RNA molecules to fo ...

as carriers of information to synthesize protein, leading to the discovery of

. After holding faculty positions at

University of California Davis The University of California, Davis (UC Davis, UCD, or Davis) is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Davis, California, United States. It is the northernmost of the ten campuses of the University ...

and

Stony Brook University Stony Brook University (SBU), officially the State University of New York at Stony Brook, is a public university, public research university in Stony Brook, New York, United States, on Long Island. Along with the University at Buffalo, it is on ...

, she moved to the

Marine Biological Laboratory The Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) is an international center for research and education in biological and environmental science. Founded in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, in 1888, the MBL is a private, nonprofit institution that was independent ...

Woods Hole Woods Hole is a census-designated place in the town of Falmouth in Barnstable County, Massachusetts, United States. It lies at the extreme southwestern corner of Cape Cod, near Martha's Vineyard and the Elizabeth Islands. The population was 78 ...

, staying there until age 80. As a senior scientist at MBL she was one of the four founding faculty members of the Josephine Bay Paul Center for Comparative Molecular Biology and Evolution led by

Mitchell Sogin Mitchell Sogin is an American microbiologist. He is a distinguished senior scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. His research investigates the evolution, diversity,and distribution of single-celled organisms. ...

. During this time, she co-founded the

EcoCyc In bioinformatics, EcoCyc is a biological database for the bacterium ''Escherichia coli'' K-12. The EcoCyc project performs literature-based curation of the ''E. coli'' genome, and of ''E. coli'' transcriptional regulation, transporters, and metab ...

database of ''Escherichia coli'' metabolism, leading the curation of metabolic pathways and genome information for ''Escherichia coli'' for over a decade, and developed classification systems for genes and proteins (including MultiFun), which were forerunners of

gene ontology The Gene Ontology (GO) is a major bioinformatics initiative to unify the representation of gene and gene product attributes across all species. More specifically, the project aims to: 1) maintain and develop its controlled vocabulary of gene and ...

Selected publications

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References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Riley, Monica 1926 births 2013 deaths American women biochemists Smith College alumni University of California, Berkeley alumni University of California, Davis faculty Stony Brook University faculty American women academics 21st-century American women