Paris

Two women scientists are to take control of two of Europe's leading bioinformatics initiatives, with a remit to expand intramural research activities.

Incoming: Janet Thornton (right) will head the EBI and Nadia Rosenthal will lead Europe's mouse mutant archive.

Janet Thornton, a structural-biology professor at University College London, has been named as research director of the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) near Cambridge in Britain. She succeeds Michael Ashburner, who has co-directed the centre with Graham Cameron since it opened five years ago.

And Nadia Rosenthal, an associate molecular-biology professor at Harvard University, will succeed Klaus Rajewsky as head of the mouse biology programme at the European Mouse Mutant Archive near Rome.

Both facilities are affiliated to the European Laboratory of Molecular Biology (EMBL), and have until now acted chiefly as service providers to outside researchers. But Fotis Kafatos, director general of the EMBL, says that the laboratory is now shifting its emphasis to functional genomics, and he expects the facilities to play a more active role in pioneering original research of their own.

The EBI recently received a multimillion grant from the European Union (see Nature 411, 229; 2001), securing its main database programmes. Thornton says that the next step is to build a research environment around these projects. “To make progress in understanding whole systems we need to integrate these genomic, proteomic and other resources,” she says.

Thornton's main research interests are in the analysis and modelling of protein structures and in rational drug design. She says that she is keen to add 'chemoinformatics' to the EBI's traditional bioinformatics role and to strengthen the links between the EBI and the pharmaceutical industry.

Ashburner, who has split his time between the EBI and his faculty position at the University of Cambridge, will now return to full-time research at the university. But he says that he is keen to help Thornton settle in, and will remain involved with the EBI to oversee a large expansion of its gene ontology (GO) consortium, an effort to build controlled vocabularies that will assist in the cross-searching of biological databases (see Nature 411, 631–632; 2001).

Approaches such as GO are absolutely critical, says Thornton. “Without being able to describe function in a computer-readable form — without functional ontologies — we will not be able to describe whole systems.”

http://www.ebi.ac.uk

http://www.emma.rm.cnr.it

http://www.geneontology.org