Monica Riley, the co-founder of the EcoCyc database, has died, according to the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole. She was 87. Riley also developed classification systems for gene products and their functions, which presaged current gene ontologies and enabled comparative and functional genomics.
"Monica Riley's annotation approaches recognized the complexity of biological functions evident in multifunctional and multi-domain containing gene products and the use of protein families in annotation," MBL scientists Gretta Serres and Mitchell Sogin write in a statement. "Today's annotation pipelines in sequencing centers all over the world rely upon the framework and function assignment rules she developed for genome analysis."