Stephen Bryant, PhD, FACMI

Stephen Bryant is a Senior Investigator at the Computational Biology Branch of the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the National Library of Medicine. He received his BA in chemistry and English from the University of Virginia and a PhD in biophysics from Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Bryant's previous positions include research officer in the Department of Crystallography at Birkbeck College at the University of London; senior research associate, protein databank at Brookhaven National Laboratory; and research scientist, Wadsworth Center for Laboratories and Research, New York State Department of Health. At NCBI, he leads the structural biology group, one of the leading research teams in development of comparative analysis algorithms for three-dimensional structure data. Some of the team's accomplishments include development of sequence-structure threading methods, which use structural data to improve recognition of distant homology relationships. Their success was demonstrated by prediction of the Leptin structure in 1995, and in the 1998 CASP structure prediction competition, the Bryant team was awarded first place in the prestigious fold-recognition category. They have developed novel methods for structureñstructure comparison. Their algorithms employ rigorous statistical tests and are fast enough to allow all-against-all ìneighboringî of the structural database. These data, available through NCBI's Entrez service, allow biologists to identify conserved structural features in protein families. In addition, the team designs and maintains the database and software systems that incorporate structure data and comparative analysis results into NCBI's information retrieval systems. The Cn3D molecular graphics viewer, distributed with Entrez, allows biologists to view simultaneously structures, sequences, and sequenceñstructure alignments.