Introduction
Christine Orengo is a computational biologist, Professor of Bioinformatics, and Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) whose extensive work in databases and algorithms development for understanding protein structure, function, and interactions has contributed a great deal to biological and biomedical research [1, 2, 3]. Since 1995, Christine has led her own research group at UCL which focuses on developing computational methods for classifying proteins and understanding protein evolution, function and interactions [1, 2, 4].
Christine currently teaches a bioinformatics half-unit course for third year undergraduate students in Structural and Molecular Biology [4]. She has also co-edited two textbooks in bioinformatics: ‘Bioinformatics: Genes, Proteins, and Computers’ alongside Professor Dame Janet Thornton and Professor David Jones and ‘Relating Protein Sequence Structure and Function’ alongside Dr. Alex Bateman and Professor Vladimir Uversky [5, 6].
Christine is currently the President of the International Society of Computational Biology (ISCB), the first woman to hold the position in the history of the society [1, 2]. She is also an elected member of the European Molecular Biology Organization since 2014 and a member of the steering committee for ELIXIR-UK [5, 7].
Throughout her impressive career, Christine has made many meaningful contributions to biological and biomedical sciences. She has collaborated with over 30 groups around the world, including experimental groups, characterising development, fibrosis, immune response, neuropathic pain, ageing, and cancer [1, 6, 8]. Last year, she worked with a group of researchers at UCL and international collaborators to predict the potential susceptibility of animals to Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 [7]. The study used computational techniques to compare the ACE2 protein in 215 animals to the human ACE2 protein and predict its binding potential with the coronavirus spike protein, leading to infection [7]. The study predicted that about 26 mammals that come into contact with humans in various settings were potentially at risk for infection by Sars-CoV-2, indicating those animals could be of interest for further infection studies for the virus [7].
Educational Background and Research Career
Christine’s background is in chemical and medical physics [3, 8]. She got her Bachelor’s degree (BS) in chemical physics from Bristol University, then did her Master’s degree in medical physics at Aberdeen University in 1977, where her research focused on the “disruption of iron metabolism in rats with Yoshida sarcomas” [3, 8]. She then finished her PhD degree in Biochemistry at UCL where she studied the redox properties of haem in proteins [8].
After finishing her PhD, Christine worked briefly in industry before she took up a postdoctoral position at the National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR). Her postdoctoral position was in Dr. Willie Taylor’s group, where she worked on a powerful and effective algorithm called SSAP for comparing protein structures (a very difficult task) [3, 6, 9]. In 1992, Christine returned to UCL as a postdoctoral fellow in Professor Dame Janet Thornton’s lab. Her research in Janet’s lab focused on using her experience from Willie’s lab to develop ways for comparing structures across the Protein Data Bank (PDB) to group them into protein families and arrange them in a hierarchical classification scheme [6, 8]. This work led to the development of the CATH Protein Structure Classification database, which Christine put together in collaboration with Janet, Professor David Jones and other colleagues [6, 7, 9]. At the time of CATH’s conception, there were a bit over three thousand structures in the PDB [8]. Since then, the size of the PDB has exploded to hundreds of thousands of protein structures, and CATH continues to provide up-to-date information about the hierarchical classification of these protein structures [6].
Christine started her own group in 1995, when she got a Medical Research Council (MRC) Senior Fellowship. In 2002, Christine was appointed a Professor of Bioinformatics at UCL and she has since led her own research group [1]. In addition to developing and maintaining the CATH database website - which has millions of monthly hits from biologists and researchers around the world - Christine’s group develops computational methods for classifying proteins, predicting protein associations and networks, and predicting protein function [4]. This work includes computational work characterizing new functional families (FunFams) using CATH. Her group consists mainly of bioinformaticians, although the group collaborates often with other experimental groups in biochemistry, biology and computer science [4].
Christine's talk on using the CATH database for protein functional annotation
Christine participated in several European bioscience networks including Biosapiens, EMBRACE, and ENFIN. She also participated for 15 years in the NIH funded genomics initiatives in the States. She currently coleads the ELIXIR European 3D-Bioinfo Strctural Bioinformatics Domain and the UK Genomics GeCIP in Functional Effects.
Christine is on the advisory board of the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics and on a number of ELIXIR Advisory boards in France, Italy and the Czech Republic.
Christine has previously been on the editorial boards of several journals including FEBS, BMC Structural Biology, PEDS, PLoS Computational Biology, Current Opinions in Structural Biology and the Journal of Structural and Functional Genomics [8]. She was on the advisory board for the Marie Nostrum Supercomputer Center in Barcelona. Christine was also a founding researcher for the company Inpharmatica, which was set up with the goal of using bioinformatics and chemo-informatics to improve target identification for drug discovery [8, 10]. The company grew to over 100 people and did very well, but was eventually disbanded into different parts and acquired by the biotechnology company Galapagos [8,10].
Christine was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2019 [1,2,4].
In 2020, she was appointed to the UKRI Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), the largest UK public funder of non-medical science, where she is responsible for ‘advising and making decisions on science, research and innovation matters, facilitating collaboration across UKRI councils, and working to ensure the future of skilled specialists and researchers essential to UK’s research and innovation’ [3, 5]
Christine’s impressive work in computational biology as well as her membership in and leadership of several large research consortia in biological and biomedical research have had (and continue to have) large and profound impacts on biological research in the UK and around the world. Her passion for biomedical sciences and the application of bioinformatics to biological research has led to contributions in the form of papers, textbooks, lectures, collaborations, consortia, and conferences in biology and biomedical science. Most of all, her warm spirit and nature and dedication to her work continues to bring together scientists from different backgrounds to do fundamental work in biological sciences.
Publications:
Christine has been an author on over 350 papers, with over 31,000 citations. A full list of her publications can be found here The following is a list of highlighted publications that include work discussed in this profile:
1. Sillitoe, I., Lewis, T.E., Cuff, A., Das, S., Ashford, P., Dawson, N. L., et al. 2015. CATH: comprehensive structural and functional annotations for genome sequences. Nucleic Acids Research: 43, D376–D381. Available at: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25348408/.
2. Lee, D., Redfern, O. & Orengo, C. Predicting protein function from sequence and structure. 2007. Nat Rev Mol Cell Biol: 8, 995–1005. Available at: https://www.nature.com/articles/nrm2281.
3. Orengo, C.A., Michie, A.D., Jones, S. Jones, D.T., Swindells, M.B., and Thornton, J.M. 1997. CATH – a hierarchic classification of protein domain structures. Structure: 5, 1093-1109. Available at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0969212697002608.
4. Orengo, C.A., Jones, D. T., and Thornton, J. 1994. Protein superfamilies and domain superfolds. Nature: 372, 631–634. Available at: https://www.nature.com/articles/372631a0.
5. Taylor, W.R. and Orengo, C.A. 1989. Protein structure alignment. Journal of Molecular Biology: 208, 1-22. Available at: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2769748/.
Resources:
1. Royalsociety.org. 2019. Christine Orengo | Royal Society. [online] Available at: https://royalsociety.org/people/christine-orengo-14112/.
2. Hunter, C., 2019. Professor Christine Orengo has been elected as Fellow of the Royal Society – ELIXIR-UK. [online] Elixiruknode.org. Available at: https://elixiruknode.org/uncategorized/professor-christine-orengo-has-been-elected-as-fellow-of-the-royal-society/.
3. wikipedia.org. 2021. Christine Orengo. [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_Orengo.
4. Orengo, C., n.d. Prof. Christine Orengo. [online] Orengo Group. Available at: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/orengo-group/people/prof-christine-orengo.
5. Bbsrc.ukri.org. 2021. Council - BBSRC. [online] Available at: https://bbsrc.ukri.org/about/governance-structure/council.
6. 1. Dhillon, P. and Thornton, J., 2020. In conversation with Janet Thornton. The FEBS Journal: 287, 4106-4113. Available at: https://febs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/febs.15567.
7. Lam, S.D., Bordin, N., Waman, V.P., Scholes, H. M., et al. 2020. SARS-CoV-2 spike protein predicted to form complexes with host receptor protein orthologues from a broad range of mammals. Nature Scientific Reports: 10. Available at: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-71936-5
8. Cdn.rcsb.org. 2008. RCSB PDB Newsletter | Spring 2008. [online] Available at: https://cdn.rcsb.org/rcsb-pdb/general_information/news_publications/newsletters/2008q1/pdb-focus.html.
9. Ismb.lon.ac.uk. n.d. Christine Orengo ISMB – ISMB. [online] Available at: http://www.ismb.lon.ac.uk/christine-orengo/.
10. Science|Business. 2006. Galapagos acquires UCL spin out in €12.5M all-share deal. [online] Available at: https://sciencebusiness.net/news/72901/Galapagos-acquires-UCL-spin-out.