David J. Lipman

I have been interested in analyzing the sequences of genes and proteins to learn about their evolution and function. One area of study has been the functional constraints on synonymous codons and untranslated regions of messenger RNAs. Another area of interest has been the classification of protein families and the genomic implications of the phylogenetic distribution of these families. Comparative sequence analysis has been essential for this research and provided some of the impetus for my work in the development of computational tools for sequence comparison. Along with my colleagues I have developed a variety of tools for rapid DNA and protein sequence comparison with particular application to database searching as well as methods for multiple sequence alignment.