Timeline

20 moments that made bioinformatics what it is. Each one is a publication, a first or a decision that can be looked up.

1. 1955Frederick Sanger completes the structure of insulin: both chains sequenced, and the bridges between them placed.
2. 1965Margaret Dayhoff publishes the Atlas of Protein Sequence and Structure.
3. 1970Needleman and Wunsch publish their alignment algorithm. Paulien Hogeweg and Ben Hesper coin the word “bioinformatics”.
4. 1971The Protein Data Bank is established.
5. 1977Sanger publishes his DNA sequencing method, and the first DNA genome: a virus of about 5,375 bases, corrected to 5,386 the next year.
6. 1978Dayhoff and colleagues publish the PAM substitution matrices.
7. 1981Smith and Waterman publish local alignment; Felsenstein publishes maximum-likelihood phylogenetics.
8. 1982GenBank, the public database of DNA sequences, is established in the United States.
9. 1986Amos Bairoch starts the Swiss-Prot protein sequence database.
10. 1990Altschul, Gish, Miller, Myers and Lipman publish BLAST.
11. 1992Steven and Jorja Henikoff publish the BLOSUM matrices.
12. 1994The first CASP experiment tests protein structure prediction blind, against structures not yet published.
13. 1995The first genome of a free-living organism, the bacterium Haemophilus influenzae, is sequenced and assembled by whole-genome shotgun.
14. 2000The Gene Ontology, a shared vocabulary for what genes do, is published.
15. 2001Draft sequences of the human genome are published.
16. 2005The first massively parallel sequencers reach the market; data volumes begin to outgrow the methods built for them.
17. 2009The SAM format for aligned reads is published, along with the fast short-read aligners that fill it.
18. 2016The FAIR principles for scientific data are published.
19. 2020At CASP14, AlphaFold 2 predicts most of the test structures with accuracy comparable to experiment.
20. 2024The Nobel Prize in Chemistry recognises computational protein design and protein structure prediction.