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Chun-Ting Zhang
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C.-T. Zhang is a bioinformatician. He was
born in Yantai, Shandong Province, China. Zhang graduated from the
Department of Physics, Fudan University in 1961 and finished his
postgraduate study in the same university in 1965. Now he is a full
professor of Tianjin university.
In his early years Zhang was engaged in the study of theoretical physics.
Later, he shifted to the area of theoretical molecular biology. His special
interest is of Bioinformatics. He established the Z curve theory of DNA
sequences and developed a geometrical approach to analyze DNA sequences.
The Z curve theory and related methodology have been applied to many
important areas, such as computer-aided gene identification in genomes,
molecular evolution and studies of long-range correlation of DNA sequences
etc. He also proposed a number of new algorithms to predict the structural
classes of globular proteins, increasing the prediction accuracy for given
database. This work has promoted the development of structural class
prediction study worldwide.
He was elected to be a Member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1995,
and a Fellow of the Third World Academy of Sciences (TWAS) in 2001. Zhang
was awarded the Prize for Science and Technology Progress, issued by the
National Education Committee in 1996 (First Class), the Prize of National
Natural Science in 1997 (Second Class) and Ho Leung Ho Lee Prize for Science
and Technology Progress in 2001.
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Feng Gao
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Prof. Gao is engaged in the bioinformatics
research, which mainly focuses on microbial genomics and functional
genomics. As the first author or corresponding author, he has published 60 peer-reviewed
papers in international journals, including Nucleic acids research, PNAS,
Briefings in Bioinformatics, and Bioinformatics, and two book chapters in
Methods in Molecular Biology. He has developed web-based systems, such as Ori-Finder used for finding oriCs
in bacterial and archaeal genomes with high accuracy, and GC-Profile used for visualizing and
analyzing the variation of GC content in genomic sequences. He also
constructed online databases, such as DoriC,
a database of oriC regions in both bacterial and archaeal genomes, DeOri, a database of eukaryotic DNA
replication origins and DEG 15, an
update of the Database of Essential Genes. Now, some of them are popular
with scientists in related fields. For example, Ori-Finder, which is cited
over 200 times according to Web of Science, has been applied to annotate
oriCs in hundreds of newly sequenced prokaryotic genomes including that
published in Nature (Graf et al., Nature, 2021) and Nature Microbiology
(Needham et al., Nature Microbiology, 2022), and has also been referred as
software tool to identify replichores (Wannier et al., Nature Reviews
Methods Primers, 2021). Currently, the predicted replication origins in
dozens of bacteria and archaea have been confirmed by experiments, and our
predictions have also been supported or used by the studies published in
Science (Korem et al., Science, 2015) and Nature (Richardson et al.,
Nature, 2016).
Prof. Gao obtained the Ph.D degree from Tianjin University in 2007 under
the supervision of Prof. Chun-Ting Zhang, a Member of the Chinese Academy
of Sciences, and a Fellow of The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS). Then, he
worked at Tianjin University as the principal investigator of the Center of
Bioinformatics, Tianjin University (TUBIC) (http://tubic.tju.edu.cn/ or
http://tubic.org/). In the past years, he has taken charge of six research
projects funded by NSFC (National Natural Science Foundation of China) or
MOST (Ministry of Science and Technology of the People's Republic of China)
in succession. He once received China Youth Science and Technology
Innovation Award (2006), the nomination award for the National Excellent
Doctoral Dissertation of China (2009) and was selected into the Program for
New Century Excellent Talents in Universities (Ministry of Education of the
People's Republic of China, 2012).
Currently, Prof. Gao is a Faculty Member of Faculty Opinions (formerly
F1000Prime) for Genomics & Genetics, Associate Editor of Frontiers in
Microbiology (2021 Outstanding Editor Award), Frontiers in Genetics,
Interdisciplinary Sciences: Computational Life Sciences and BMC
Microbiology, the editorial board member of Briefings in Bioinformatics,
Genomics, Proteomics & Bioinformatics, iMeta, Scientific Reports (Editorial Board
Highlights), Microbiology Spectrum, PLoS ONE. He has served as Guest
Editor for Frontiers in Microbiology by organizing the research topic 'DNA Replication
Origins in Microbial Genomes' and its Volume II, Volume
III. Gratifyingly, the papers published in this topic series were
highly accessed, and the total views are 200,000 now. He also hosted a
themed issue 'Recent
developments of software and database in microbial genomics and functional
genomics' for Briefings in Bioinformatics. The thirteen articles in
this themed issue have been well-received by a wide international audience,
and have been cited over 3,500 times according to Web of Science.
Currently, he hosts a special issue on 'Artificial Intelligence in Omics'
for Genomics, Proteomics & Bioinformatics as Guest Editor. For more
details, please visit http://faculty.tju.edu.cn/fgao.
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