Dr. Toby Gibson EMBL Heidelberg, Germany

Toby Gibson is at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany. He studied Molecular Biology at Edinburgh University and did his PhD at the LMB, Cambridge, sequencing EBV. He is a computational biologist: i.e. a biologist who finds computers to be useful adjuncts to biological research. He is... read morea co-developer of the widely used Clustal series of multiple sequence alignment software. He oversees the development of ELM, the Eukaryotic Linear Motif resource (http://elm.eu.org/) devoted to protein sequence motifs involved in cell signalling and regulation. Toby is fascinated by the structure-function paradigm for massively interacting hub proteins such as p53, IRS-1, AKAPs and many, many more. These are characterised by large natively unstructured protein segments that are repositories of abundant “linear motifs” or SLiMs - short regulatory sites that interact with other proteins. During the Pandemic, Toby has been working with colleagues on SLiMs in the SARS-CoV-2 entry system.