Cyrus Homi Chothia (19 February 1942 – 26 November 2019) was an English biochemist who was an emeritus scientist at the Medical Research Council (MRC)

Laboratory of Molecular Biology The Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) is a research institute in Cambridge, England, involved in the revolution in molecular biology which occurred in the 1950–60s. Since then it has remained a major medical r ...

(LMB) at the

University of Cambridge The University of Cambridge is a public collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209 and granted a royal charter by Henry III in 1231, Cambridge is the world's third oldest surviving university and one of its most pr ...

and emeritus fellow of

Wolfson College, Cambridge Wolfson College () is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, England. The majority of students at the college are postgraduates. The college also admits "mature" undergraduates (aged 21 and above), with around ...

Education

Chothia was educated at

Alleyn's School Alleyn's School is a 4–18 co-educational, independent, Church of England, day school and sixth form in Dulwich, London, England. It is a registered charity and was originally part of Edward Alleyn's College of God's Gift charitable foundation ...

, then went to study at Durham University graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1965. Chothia then completed a Master of Science degree at Birkbeck College in 1967 and a PhD from

University College London , mottoeng = Let all come who by merit deserve the most reward , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £143 million (2020) , budget = ...

under the supervision of , the son of Linus Pauling.

Research and career

After his PhD Chothia worked in the Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) for three years. He then worked with

Michael Levitt Michael Levitt, ( he, מיכאל לויט; born 9 May 1947) is a South African-born biophysicist and a professor of structural biology at Stanford University, a position he has held since 1987. Levitt received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistr ...

at the

Weizmann Institute of Science The Weizmann Institute of Science ( he, מכון ויצמן למדע ''Machon Vaitzman LeMada'') is a public research university in Rehovot, Israel, established in 1934, 14 years before the State of Israel. It differs from other Israeli unive ...

followed by two years with Joel Janin at the

Institut Pasteur The Pasteur Institute (french: Institut Pasteur) is a French non-profit private foundation dedicated to the study of biology, micro-organisms, diseases, and vaccines. It is named after Louis Pasteur, who invented pasteurization and vaccines f ...

in Paris. In 1976 Chothia returned to England to work at University College London and the LMB. With Arthur Lesk he showed that proteins adapt to mutations by changes in structure. In 1992 he proposed that most proteins are built of domains that come from a small number of families. He collaborated with Alexey Murzin, Steven Brenner and Tim Hubbard to create the

Structural Classification of Proteins database The Structural Classification of Proteins (SCOP) database is a largely manual classification of protein structural domains based on similarities of their structures and amino acid sequences. A motivation for this classification is to determine ...

(SCOP), a periodic table for all known protein structures. With

Julian Gough Julian Gough (born 1966) is an English-Irish musician who was the singer and lyricist for the Galway band Toasted Heretic, and is best known for his songs "Galway and Los Angeles", "You can Always go Home" and "Lysergic acid diethylamide, LSD ( ...

he created the

Superfamily database SUPERFAMILY is a database and search platform of structural and functional annotation for all proteins and genomes. It classifies amino acid sequences into known structural domains, especially into SCOP superfamilies. Domains are functional, str ...

which uses

Hidden Markov models A hidden Markov model (HMM) is a statistical Markov model in which the system being modeled is assumed to be a Markov process — call it X — with unobservable ("''hidden''") states. As part of the definition, HMM requires that there be an ob ...

to identify protein sequences that are related to those of known structures. During his career, Chothia supervised 19 successful PhD students to completion including Alex Bateman, Steven E. Brenner,

Mark Bender Gerstein Mark Bender Gerstein is an American scientist working in bioinformatics and Data Science. , he is co-director of the Yale Computational Biology and Bioinformatics program. Mark Gerstein is Albert L. Williams Professor of Biomedical Informa ...

Sarah Teichmann Sarah Amalia Teichmann (born 1975) is a German scientist who is head of cellular genetics at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and a visiting research group leader at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI). She serves as director of rese ...

Bissan Al-Lazikani Professor Bissan Al-Lazikani PhD FRSB MBCS is a data scientist and drug discoverer. She applies computational techniques to help solve critical bottlenecks in cancer drug discovery and development. Since 2021 she has been professor of genomic m ...

, Goga Apic, Samantha Barré Matthew Bashton, Dan Bolser, Michael Bremang, Bernard de Bono, Emma Ganley (née Hill), Martin Madera, Siarhei Maslau, Susan Miller, Jong Park (aka Jong Bhak), Rajkumar Sasidharan, and Christine Vogel.

Awards and honours

Chothia was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2000. His certificate of election and candidature reads: In 2015, Chothia was elected a Fellow of the

International Society for Computational Biology The International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) is a scholarly society for researchers in computational biology and bioinformatics. The society was founded in 1997 to provide a stable financial home for the Intelligent Systems for Mole ...

(ISCB) and was awarded the ISCB Accomplishment by a Senior Scientist Award in honour of his work in using computational methods to understand protein structure. Alongside

David Haussler David Haussler (born 1953) is an American bioinformatician known for his work leading the team that assembled the first human genome sequence in the race to complete the Human Genome Project and subsequently for comparative genome analysis that d ...

and

Michael Waterman Michael Spencer Waterman (born June 28, 1942) is a Professor of Biology, Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Southern California (USC), where he holds an Endowed Associates Chair in Biological Sciences, Mathematics and Computer ...

, Chothia was awarded the 2015

Dan David Prize The Dan David Prize is a major international award that recognizes and supports outstanding contributions to the study of history and other disciplines that shed light on the human past. It awards nine prizes of $300,000 each year to outstanding ...

for his contributions to the field of bioinformatics.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Chothia, Cyrus British bioinformaticians Fellows of the Royal Society Fellows of Wolfson College, Cambridge Place of birth missing Alumni of University College London Academics of University College London People educated at Alleyn's School 1942 births 2019 deaths Fellows of the International Society for Computational Biology Alumni of University College, Durham Weizmann Institute of Science faculty Pasteur Institute British people of Parsi descent