Eugene V. Koonin
Senior Investigator
National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI)
National Library of Medicine (NLM)
National Institutes of Health (NIH)
Bldg. 38A, Room 5N503
8600 Rockville Pike
Bethesda, MD 20894, USA
Tel: (301) 435-5913
Fax: (301) 435-7794 or (301) 480-9241
e-mail:
koonin@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Principal Research Interests
Generally, we are interested in understanding the evolution of life. Specifically, to obtain glimpses of such understanding, we employ existing and new methods of computational biology to perform research in three main directions.
- Empirical comparative and evolutionary genomics - comparison of prokaryotic and eukaryotic genomes with the aim of predicting gene functions, constructing evolutionary scenarios for particular gene families and functional categories, and deciphering general evolutionary trends. One of the evolutionary phenomena we are particularly interested in is horizontal gene transfer between diverse organisms. One of the products of this research direction is the database of Clusters of Orthologous Groups of proteins (COGs).
- Exploitation of genome comparisons, particularly, those between relatively close genomes, for addressing fundamanetal issue of evolutionary biology such as the nature of adaptation and selection in different categories of genes.
- Classification and evolutionary analysis of protein domains and domain architectures. An important dimension in this type of research is discovery of "new" domains that are shared by many diverse proteins but have not been defined previously.
