www.manchester.ac.uk/

The University of Manchester was created by bringing together The Victoria University of Manchester and UMIST, two of Britain's most distinguished universities, in 2004. Around 4,300 academic and research staff teach more than 28,000 undergraduate and more than 11,000 postgraduate students across 400 degree programmes. The University hosts arguably the largest bioinformatics research group outside the EBI, with strong research programmes in molecular and genome evolution, comparative and organismal biology, computational biology, and structural and functional systems.

www.bioinf.manchester.ac.uk/dbbrowser

Terri Attwood is a biophysicist by training, having received her BSc and PhD from Leeds University in 1982 and 1984. As a postdoc, she became interested in protein sequence and structure analysis and, in 1993, was awarded a prestigious Royal Society University Research Fellowship to develop tools for computational analysis of protein families: the first 5 years of the fellowship were held at University College London, and the last 4 at the University of Manchester, where she became Professor of Bioinformatics in 2001.

Her work on protein sequence analysis (especially of G protein-coupled receptors) led to the development of various databases: e.g., PRINTS (www.bioinf.manchester.ac.uk/dbbrowser/PRINTS), InterPro (www.ebi.ac.uk/interpro), CADRE (www.cadre-genomes.org.uk). She has also pioneered and co-developed a range of software tools: e.g., CINEMA/Utopia (utopia.cs.man.ac.uk/utopia), MINOTAUR (www.bioinf.manchester.ac.uk/dbbrowser/minotaur/about.html), EMBER (www.ember.man.ac.uk).

More recently, her interests have extended to semantic integration of research data with scholarly publications, in order to bring static documents to ‘life’. In particular, with Steve Pettifer, she ran a pilot project with Portland Press Ltd. to create the Semantic Biochemical Journal by embedding Utopia functionality directly into static PDF articles. The Semantic BJ was launched in 2009, powered by Utopia Documents (www.biochemj.org/bj/semantic_faq.htm).

In her spare time, she Chairs EMBnet, the Global Bioinformatics Network (www.embnet.org), and sits on the Executive Board of the International Society for Biocuration (http://biocurator.org). She is currently Co-Chair of the Bioinformatics Training Network (www.biotnet.org), Vice Chair of the COST Action NGS Data Analysis Network, SeqAhead (www.seqahead.eu) and co-Chair of Working Group 4 of COST Action EuroKUP (www.eurokup.org).

Attwood, T.K., Gisel, A., Eriksson, N-E. & Bongcam-Rudloff, E. (2011) Concepts, historical milestones and the central place of bioinformatics in modern biology: a European perspective. Intech Online Publishers, ISBN 978-953-307-282-1.

Schneider, M.V., Walter, P., Blatter, M.C., Watson, J., Brazas, M.D., Rother, K., Budd, A., Via, A., van Gelder, C.W.G., Jacob, J., Fernandes, P., Nyronen, T., De Las Rivas, J., Blicher, T., Loveland, J., McDowall, J., Jones, P., Vaughan, B., Lopez, R., Attwood, T.K. & Brooksbank, C. (2011) Bioinformatics Training Network (BTN): A community resource for bioinformatics trainers. Briefings in Bioinformatics, PMID: 22110242.

Vroling, B., Thorne, D., McDermott, P., Attwood, T.K. & Pettifer, S.R. (2011) Integrating GPCR-specific information with full text articles. BMC Bioinformatics, 12(1), 362.

Attwood, T.K., Kell, D.B., McDermott, P., Marsh, J., Pettifer, S.R. & Thorne, D. (2010) Utopia Documents: linking scholarly literature with research data. Bioinformatics, 26, i568-i574.

Attwood, T.K., Kell, D.B., McDermott, P., Marsh, J., Pettifer, S.R. & Thorne, D. (2009) Calling International Rescue - knowledge lost in literature and data landslide! Biochemical Journal, 424(3), 317-333.