Post 8: International Day of Women and Girls in Science🔬

Published: June 17, 2023

This post was written on February 11, 2023. This day celebrates the International Day of Women and Girls in Science.

Taking advantage of this day, and since I usually see the same names, I’d like to highlight the work of two contemporary scientists I admire most: Jill Banfield and Janet Thornton.

The team Jill Banfield has built has changed the way we study microbes, creating new strategies to study them and discovering new groups of microbes with interesting biological functions. It sounds easy, but new algorithms and strategies had to be developed to sample microbes in their habitats and sequence their genomes on a massive scale. One of her most interesting contemporary works is the discovery of genomic structures known as “Borgs,” which could help us generate biofuels more efficiently and in the fight against climate change. Here is a short video of Jill talking about her research and the Borgs paper.

On the other hand, the work of Janet Thornton has contributed to understanding proteins. For example, by studying how enzymes work, what biochemical and geometric conditions allow catalysis, and how we can use this information to predict the function of other enzymes. Additionally, the team of Janet has classified the enormous diversity of protein structures into a classification scheme known as “CATH,” which has allowed us to better understand protein evolution. Here is a video of her from the 2000s where she talked about the future of bioinformatics and, interestingly, how by around 2020 she predicted we would have an abundance of data and some resolved areas (like representative genomes of biodiversity).

And the CATH database:
http://www.cathdb.info/

Addendum:

Other amazing protein scientists are:

And some amazing microbiologists (although I don’t remember many names because I’m not up-to-date):

Also, recently Janet announced her retirement, leaving behind a great legacy.

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