The MEROPS team
The database is produced by a small team consisting of Neil D. Rawlings and Alan J. Barrett. No longer with the team, Emmet A. O'Brien, Dominic P. Tolle, Fraser R. Morton and Chai Yin Kok made valuable contributions during 2000-2001, 2001-2003, 2003-2006 and 2006-2007 respectively.
We also wish to acknowledge the help and advice that MEROPS received from the late Professor Fred Woessner (Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, Miami, USA).
The help and support from the EMBL-EBI and Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute web teams, in particular Matthew Waller and former member Jody Clements, is also very gratefully acknowledged.
Neil D. Rawlings
"I have been fascinated by protein sequences since my time as a sequencer at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin. This interest was focused on the classification of peptidases when I joined Alan Barrett's team at the Strangeways Research Laboratory in Cambridge in 1982, moving to the Babraham Institute in 1995 and on to the Sanger Institute in 2002. My PhD thesis, published in 1996, was entitled Evolution and Classification of Peptidases."
Alan J. Barrett
"Most of my scientific career has been spent working on or writing about proteolytic enzymes, which I find endlessly fascinating. Since my first encounter with a computer in the 1970's I have been almost as intrigued by them as by peptidases, so it is a happy circumstance that the MEROPS database allows me to indulge both passions simultaneously!"
Alex Bateman
Alex has kindly accepted the MEROPS team as part of his Pfam group at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, and is providing a wealth of help and advice from his great experience of work with protein families.
The MEROPS project is made possible by financial support from the Wellcome Trust.
