Janet Thornton Ing for Future Research Needs

THIS MONTH are dedicated to developing and maintaining services THE AUTHOR FILE for the scientific community, including databases such as the genome portal Ensembl, the proteomic data- base UniProt and more, all of which requires strategiz- Janet Thornton ing for future research needs. “These resources don’t Finding ways to navigate the reactions happen overnight; they’re big teams and they have to of life and herd tigers are all part of her think carefully,” she says. workday. Fostering collaborative science internally and across organizational and national boundaries such as for The wealth of available sequenced genomes invites sci- the project ELIXIR—the European life sciences infra- entists to explore the molecular basis of life, to browse structure for biological information, a pan-European and parse the beautiful infrastructure she has spearheaded to help scientists complexity of this now share data—is hard work, especially in times of fiscal “open book,” says Janet belt-tightening. At times, Thornton says, the task can Thornton. feel more like “herding tigers” than cats. A physicist turned Overall she sees the role of computational biology computational shifting, she says. In physics, work by experimentalists biologist, Thornton led to theoretical lines of inquiry. Biology is in its data- directs the European gathering stage, and rapidly moving toward the ability Bioinformatics to model processes such as the effect of a drug on the Institute (EBI), where human body. “We’re only a fraction of the way towards she has cultivated being able to do that,” she says, but she believes the EBI interdisciplinary EBI’s resources help to create the “bedrock” for this teamwork since 2001. capability. Janet Thornton She has authored Besides her passion for work, Thornton enjoys lis- around 400 papers and tening to music and cycling. For over three decades enjoys studying proteomes, metabolomes and the she has belonged to a book reactome—the “reactions of life,” as she calls them. “I club in which members have “I just love just love what I do,” she says. remained constant. They what I do.” Thornton studied physics at the University of recently decided to read and Nottingham and shifted to biophysics for her PhD at discuss the epic poem Beowulf. the UK’s National Institute for Medical Research. She A former postdoctoral fellow in the Thornton lab, Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. America, Inc. Nature has received many awards, including a British order Sarah Teichmann, who works on gene expression and 4 of chivalry: for her services to bioinformatics, she has protein complexes and who has a dual appointment © 201 been named Dame Commander of the Order of the at the EBI and the Sanger Institute, is grateful that her British Empire. mentor exposed her to a vibrant computational biol- In her most recent work, she and her team devel- ogy community. Thornton helped Teichmann develop oped EC-BLAST, a set of algorithms and a web service her own research identity and has remained a mentor npg that allows scientists to quickly compare and contrast post fellowship. enzyme reactions. Scientists might use it to see the Despite her success and many accolades, Thornton physiological reactions with which a potential drug always creates community and remains “down-to- might interact, for example. Knowing reactions mat- earth,” says Teichmann. Thornton is a well-known ters: one compound might heal, another might harm— and respected scientist who runs an institute and is a just, for example, because of stereochemical differenc- mother of two. “This type of role model is invaluable es, meaning the positioning of atoms in the molecule. and has had a profound influence on me—I have two EC-BLAST has been five years in “gestation,” young daughters—as well as probably on many other Thornton says. The project brought together chem- researchers” Teichmann says. ists and computer scientists who tested the algo- At a gathering of Thornton’s ‘science family’ a few rithms on different groups of enzymes. “You learn years ago with over one hundred attendees, Imperial by applying the tool to look at specific questions,” College researcher Michael Sternberg, a long-time she says. Many of the algorithms had to be specifi- friend and collaborator of Thornton’s, summed up cally developed. “Initially we didn’t have the tools to her career by calling Thornton the “mother of UK think in stereochemistry,” she says, referring to one bioinformatics.” example. Vivien Marx EC-BLAST is one of the EBI’s many web services. Scientists can download open-source software or use Rahman, S.A., Martinez Cuesta, S., Furnham, N., any of the many EBI tools online. “There’s no doubt Holliday, G.L. & Thornton, J.M. EC-BLAST: a tool that the magic is the people who are here,” Thornton to automatically search and compare enzyme says of the over 500 EBI staff members. Many of them reactions. Nat. Methods 11, 171–174 (2014). NATURE METHODS | VOL.11 NO.2 | FEBRUARY 2014 | 115.

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