Liisa Holm

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Liisa Holm, a professor in the department of biological and environmental sciences at the University of Helsinki, has worked on structural bioinformatics and the evolutionary classification of proteins. Her recent work focuses on novel algorithms for sequence analysis. This research has many applications in functional genomics: fold and function assignment, for example.

During her fellowship year, she will develop novel concepts to improve algorithms for pattern discovery from biological sequences. Asserting that the capacity of a protein to carry out a function is encoded in conserved sequence patterns, Holm aims to derive a global decomposition of the protein universe into protein families and conserved sequence motifs that characterize them. The project will exploit a unique data structure, the global trace graph, which organizes all protein sequences into hypothetical multiple sequence alignments. The application of the algorithms to large-scale data sets would significantly advance the mapping of functional networks in the cell.

Holm received her MSc and her PhD from the University of Helsinki. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg and was a group leader at the European Bioinformatics Institute in Cambridge, England. She is the recipient of a European Molecular Biology Organization long-term fellowship.