Rost originally started his scientific career as theoretical physicist. After studying physics at the University of Giessen and physics, history, philosophy, and psychology at the University of Heidelberg, Rost received his PhD at the University Heidelberg for his work at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in 1994.[7] Following research internships at EMBL and the European Bioinformatics Institute in Cambridge (UK), in 1998, he became assistant professor at the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics in the College of Surgeons and Physicians of the CU Medical Center of Columbia University in the City of New York. In 2000, he became associate professor at Columbia University and in 2009 he accepted an appointment to the Chair of Bioinformatics at the Technical University of Munich. He is a member of the New York Academy of Sciences and has been President of ISCB, the International Society for Computational Biology from 2007-2014. As of 2021[update], Rost has authored or co-authored over 300 scientific publications with a Google Scholar h-index of 100.[3][11][12][13]
Research
Rost research has focused on combining Machine Learning and evolutionary information to predict aspects of critical importance to advance our understanding of evolution, protein structure and protein function. Examples of research carried out in his lab includes the prediction of enzymatic activity (ECGO), interaction partners (ISIS, DISIS, PiNAT), subcellular localization (LOCtree, LOCnet, PredictNLS), functional effects of point mutations/SNPs (SNAP), disordered regions (MD, NORSnet, Ucon), membrane spanning segments (PROF/PHDhtm), secondary structure (PROF/PHD, RePROF, DSSPcont),[17] solvent accessibility (PROF/PHD, RePROF), internal residue-residue contacts (PROFcon) and the clustering of proteins into families (CHOP).[18]
His current focus is on predicting the effects of individual mutations mostly on the level of non-synonymous changes in coding regions, i.e. single nucleotide changes (or Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms) that alter the amino acid sequence.
His group has been dedicated to making their tools available online as demonstrated through the first internet server for protein structure prediction and sequence analysis, Predictprotein,[6] that was launched in 1992, and has been continuously in service ever since. Rost's work has been published in leading peer reviewedscientific journals including Nature,[8][19][20][21]Science,[22]PLOS Genetics.[23]
Rost was awarded the Professorship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in 2009. He was made a Fellow of the ISCB in 2015.[26] In 2016, he was awarded the Outstanding Contribution to ISCB.[25]
^Rost, B.; Sander, C. (1994). "Combining evolutionary information and neural networks to predict protein secondary structure". Proteins: Structure, Function, and Genetics. 19 (1): 55–72. doi:10.1002/prot.340190108. PMID8066087. S2CID15203189.
^Rost, B. (1996). "PHD: Predicting one-dimensional protein structure by profile-based neural networks". Computer Methods for Macromolecular Sequence Analysis. Methods in Enzymology. Vol. 266. pp. 525–539. doi:10.1016/s0076-6879(96)66033-9. ISBN9780121821678. PMID8743704.
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