http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v31/n10/full/nbt.2721.html?WT.ec_id=NBT-201310
The year was 1989 and Stephen Altschul had a problem. Sam Karlin, the brilliant mathematician whose help he needed, was so convinced of the power of a mathematically tractable but biologically constrained measure of protein sequence similarity that he would not listen to Altschul (or anyone else for that matter). So Altschul essentially tricked him into solving the problem stymying the field of computational biology by posing it in terms of pure mathematics, devoid of any reference to biology. The treat from that trick became known as the Karlin-Altschul statistics that are a key part of BLAST, arguably the most successful piece of computational biology software of all time.
No comments:
Post a Comment