The European Bioinformatics Institute's Janet Thornton has certainly been busy as Nature Methods notes that she has authored some 400 articles and directs the EBI.
Her team, it adds, recently developed EC-BLAST, a tool that allows researchers to examine various enzymatic reactions. EC-BLAST, which Thornton notes was five years in the making, drew on the efforts of both chemists and computer scientists to test the algorithms. “You learn by applying the tool to look at specific questions,” she says.
Thornton has also been involved in kicking off ELIXIR, an infrastructure to enable European life scientists to share data. In a related blog post at Methagora, Thornton adds that such "initiatives are the best way forward because, despite the setbacks, everyone broadly agrees. So it is a case of getting through the politics and making the science happen.