"Evolution is not efficient."

William R. Pearson
Professor of Biochemistry and Computer Science

Department of Computer Science
School of Engineering and Applied Science
University of Virginia
151 Engineer's Way, P.O. Box 400740
Charlottesville, Virginia 22904-4740

Phone: (434) 924-2818
Fax: (434) 924-5069
Email: wrp@virginia.edu
Office: 6-057 Jordan Hall, UVa

Home page of William R. Pearson

Areas of Interest

Computational biology, molecular evolution, biological sequence comparison

Biographical Sketch

ill Pearson received his Ph.D. in Biochemistry in 1977 from the California Institute of Technology. He then did a post-doctoral fellowships at the Caltech Marine Station in Corona del Mar, CA and at the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics at Johns Hopkins. In 1983 he joined UVa's Department of Biochemistry at the University of Virginia. He is an author or co-author of more than 60 papers and book chapters.

Research

earson co-developed FASTA, one of the first widely used programs for searching protein and DNA sequence databases. Concurrent advances in molecular cloning techniques, DNA sequencing methods, rapid sequence comparison algorithms, and computer workstations has revolutionized the role of biological sequence comparison in molecular biology. Sequence comparison is now used routinely as the first characterization of a DNA or protein sequence and is an essential part of the human genome project. Currently, Pearson is developing and testing sequence comparison methods that will allow us to "push back" the evolutionary horizon - the distance at which related protein sequence can be reliably detected - from the current 800 - 1,000 million years to more than 2,000 million years. Other projects use genome-scale sequence comparison to identify potential "young" proteins - proteins that emerged over the last 200 - 400 million years. In addition to computational biology, he maintains an active "wet-lab" research program on the genetics of enzymes that detoxify chemical carcinogens.

Selected Publications

Sensitivity and Selectivity in Protein Structure Comparison M. L. Sierk and W. R. Pearson, Protein Science, 13, 2004, pp. 773-785.

Visualization of Near-Optimal Sequence Alignments, M. E. Smoot, S. A. Guerlain, and W. R. Pearson, Bioinformatics, Volume 20, Number 6, 2004, pp. 953-958.

Empirical Determination of Effective Gap Penalties for Sequence Comparison, J. T. Reese and W. R. Pearson, Bioinformatics, Volume 18, Number 11, 2002, pp. 1500-1507.

Getting more From Less: Algorithms for Rapid Protein Identification with Multiple Short Peptide Sequences, A. J. Mackey, T. A. J. Haystead, and W. R. Pearson, Molecular and Cellular Proteomics, Volume 1, Number 2, pp. 139-147

Relational Databases for Biologists, A. J. Mackey and W. R. Pearson, Tutorial, International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology, Edmunton, Alberta, 2002.

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