Research Interests and Accomplishments

Scott Durkin joined the Institute in 2000 as a Bioinformatics Analyst in the Prokaryotic Annotation Group. As part of this group, he is responsible for the annotation, analysis, and GenBank submission of prokaryotic projects. He also helps develop, implement and maintain in-house annotation analysis tools (e.g. Manatee, MGAT, mummer_remap). The majority of his work supports the Human Microbiome Project (HMP) and Genomic Sequencing Center for Infectious Diseases (GSCID) projects at JCVI. Additionally he supports faculty working on traditional individual prokaryotic genome projects. His professional interests are in the automated identification of large scale genomic structures (operons, prophage regions, pathogenicity islands) and comparative genomics.

He earned his B.S. and M.A. degrees in Biology from The College of William and Mary in Virginia. Prior to joining the Institute, he was employed for 12 years at the American Type Culture Collection. There he worked in the lab of Bill Nierman mapping human ESTs to the human genome in collaboration with Craig Venter. He also worked in the lab of Yvonne Reid where he developed and implemented a short tandem repeat-based authentication method for the ATCC human cell line collection.

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