I studied Physics for my bachelor & Master degrees but was attracted to computational biology for my PhD work. After obtaining the PhD degree, I worked as Scientist at Centre for Cellular & Molecular Biology (India), where I helped to setup Bioinformatics facility. Subsequently, I joined the Biocomputing Programme of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg (Germany). My work at EMBL was supported by a grant from the prestigious Human Frontier Science Program. In 1996, I moved to European Bioinformatics Institute (UK) as staff scientist and spent almost a decade there. I initiated and led a project on Alternative Splicing and on Alternate Transcript Diversity at this institute; the work led to two popular databases - one on Alternative Splicing (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/asd), and the other on Alternate Transcript Diversity (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/atd). My research activities have so far focused on diverse areas in Genome Informatics and Computational Biology. Currently, I work as Group Leader at CRS4 (Sardinia) in the area of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology of Disease Processes.

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SOME RECENT PUBLICATIONS & PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES

I. DATABASE & COMPUTATIONAL TOOLS (Developed in the context of my last work at European Bioinformatics Institute)

1. AltSplice Computational Pipeline and Alternative splicing bioinformatics resource (database of splice variants and patterns, and RNA Splicing WorkBench) – see http://www.ebi.ac.uk/asd.

2. AltTrans Computational pipeline and Alternate Transcript Diversity database (database of transcript diversity due to variants at splicing, polyadenylation, and transcription start) – see http://www.ebi.ac.uk/atd

3. Some Presentations at conferences

3.1. Oral Presentation at Symposium on Alternate Transcript Diversity – Data, Biology, and Therapeutics - 22-23 Nov, 2004 European Bioinformatics Institute, Hinxton, Cambridgeshire, UK “Alternative Splicing Database Project”.

3.2. Oral Presentation at ISMB2005 Alternative Splicing Special Interest Group Meeting, June 23-24, Detroit (MI), USA - “ASD: A Bioinformatics Resource on Alternative Splicing”.

3.3. Poster Presentations

a. T.A. Thanaraj*, S. Stamm, F. Clark, J-J. Riethoven, V. Le Texier and J. Muilu. “ASD: the Alternative Splicing Database”. Abstract in the ISMB/ECCB 2004 book of abstracts of the 12th International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology / 3rd European Conference on Computational Biology, held in Glasgow, United Kingdom from 31 July - 4 August 2004.

b. J-J. Riethoven, V. Le Texier, C. Gopoalakrishnan, V. Kumanduri, S. Stamm, and T.A. Thanaraj* “ASD: a Bioinformatics Resource for Alternative Splicing”. Abstract in the ISMB 2005 book of abstracts of the 13th International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology, held in Detroit (MI), USA from 25 June - 29 June 2005.

c. Kumanduri, V., V. Le Texier, J.J.M. Riethoven, C. Gopalakrishnan, and T.A. Thanaraj*. “Human-Mouse comparisons of splice structures in the AltSplice database”. ECCB 2005 book of abstracts of the fourth European Conference on Computational Biology, held in Madrid, Spain from 21 September - 1 October 2005; See the extended abstract at ECCB 2005.

II. SOME RECENT PUBLICATIONS

1. Le Texier, V., Riethoven, J-J., Kumanduri, V., Gopalakrishnan, C., Lopez, F., Gautheret, D. and Thanaraj, T.A.. (2006) “AltTrans: Transcript Pattern Variants annotated for both alternative splicing and alternative polyadenylation”. BMC Bioinformatics. 2006, 7:169 (23 March 2006). See http://www.ebi.ac.uk/atd for the data and annotation on alternate transcript patterns.

2. Stamm, S., Le Texier,V., Riethoven,, J., Gopalakrishan, C., Kumanduri, V., Tang, Y., Barbosa-Morais , N.L., and Thanaraj^*, T.A. - (2006) “ASD: A Bioinformatics Resource on Alternative Splicing”. Nucleic Acids Research, 34: D46-D55. See http://www.ebi.ac.uk/asd for the data, annotation and analysis tools on alternative splicing.

3. Stamm,S., Ben-Ari,S. Rafalska,I. Tang,Y., Zhang,Z., Toiber,D. and Thanaraj, T.A. & Soreq,H. (2005) “Function of alternative splicing”. GENE, 344, 1-20.

4. Tang, Y., Novoyatleva , T., Benderska, N., Kishore, S., Thanaraj, T.A. and Stamm, S. (2004) Analysis of alternative splicing in vivo using minigenes. In Westhof, Bindereif, Schön and Hartmann (eds.), Handbook of RNA Biochemistry. Wiley-VCH.

5. Thanaraj^*, T.A., Stamm, S., Clark, F., Riethoven, J-J., Le Texier, V. & Muilu, J (2004) “ASD: the Alternative Splicing Database”.. Nucl. Acids. Res. 32: D64-D69.

6. Thanaraj, T.A. , Cochet, O. & Stamm, S. (2003) “Misregulation of alternative splicing as a novel target for drug interventions”. Pharmaceutical visions, 3/2003, 4-7.

7. Thanaraj ^* ,T.A., Clark, F. & Muilu, J. (2003) “Conservation of human alternative splice events in mouse”. Nucleic Acids Res., 31(10):2544-52.

8. Thanaraj, T.A. & Stamm, S. (2003) “Prediction and analysis of alternatively spliced exons from genomic sequences.” Prog Mol Subcell Biol., 31:1-31

9. Clark, F. & Thanaraj^*, T.A. "Categorization and characterization of transcript confirmed constitutively and alternatively spliced introns and exons from human. (2002) Human Molecular Genetics, 11(4), 1-14.

10. Thanaraj^*, T.A. & Clark, F. (2001) "GC-AG alternative intron isoforms with weak donor sites show enhanced consensus at acceptor exon positions" Nucleic Acids Research 29:2581-2593.

11. Thanaraj^*, T.A., Alan Robinson, Juha Muilu, Jean-Jack Reithoven (2000) "Paradigm Shifts in the Approaches for Gene Annotation". Briefings in Bioinformatics, 1(4), 324-330.

12. Thanaraj^*, T.A. & Alan Robinson (2000) "Prediction of Exact Exon Boundaries" Briefings in Bioinformatics, 1(4), 343-356. See http://www.ebi.ac.uk/asd-srv//splice-prediction/web/wrapper.cgi for the tool developed.

13. Thanaraj^*, T.A. (2000) "Positional Characterisation of False Positives from Computational Predictions of Human Splice Sites". Nucleic Acids Research, 28 (3), 744-754.