FRANÇOIS MAJOR, Ph.D.
- Principal Investigator, Computational and Theoretical Biology Laboratory, Institute for Research in Immunology and Cancer
- Full Professor, Department of Computer Science and Operations Research, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Université de Montréal
- Accredited Member, Department of Biochemistry, Faculty of Medicine, Université de Montréal
- Member, Centre Robert-Cedergren, Université de Montréal
AWARDS & HONOURS
- Canadian Institutes of Health Research Investigator, 2002-2007
- New Investigator, Medical Research Council of Canada, 1994-1999
- Fogarty Fellowship Award, National Institutes of Health, 1990-1994
- Postdoctoral Fellow, Fonds pour la formation de chercheurs et l’aide à la recherche, 1991-1992
- Doctoral Studentship, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, 1987-1990
TRAINING
- Postdoctoral training with David Lipman, National Institutes of Health/National Center for Biotechnology, Bethesda, MD, 1990-1994
- Ph.D. in computer science with Robert Cedergren and Guy Lapalme, Université de Montréal, 1990
- M.Sc. in computer science, Université de Montréal, 1987
- B.Sc. in biological sciences, Université de Montréal, 1984
RESEARCH SUPPORT
- Canadian Institutes of Health Research,
Investigator, 2002-2007
- Postdoctoral Fellow, Fonds pour la formation de chercheurs et l’aide à la recherche, 1991-1992
- Doctoral Studentship, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, 1987-1990
François Major is a principal investigator at the Institute for Research in Immunology and Cancer (IRIC) where he has established the Computational and Theoretical Biology Laboratory as well as the Institute’s Bioinformatics Core Facility. He is also a full professor with the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research of the Université de Montréal, which he joined in 1994.
Dr. Major was interested in bioinformatics well before the term was coined in the nineties. In fact, from the time that he started his advanced studies in computer science at the Université de Montréal in 1984, his ambition was to apply his knowledge to biology. His special interest is ribonucleic acids (RNA), which, along with proteins, play a primary role in cellular metabolism.
While working on his doctorate, Dr. Major developed a three-dimensional RNA modelling program, MC-Sym, an important contribution to bioinformatics. There are currently some fifty users of this software all over the world, making it one of the most widely-used computer programs in the field of RNA research. During his postdoctoral training at the National Center for Biotechnology of the National Institutes of Health (1990-1994), Dr. Major broadened his knowledge of RNA, while continuing to work on the MC-Sym software.
In 1994, he joined the Université de Montréal as a researcher. Over the next decade, he also accepted positions as a visiting professor at the École supérieure d’ingénieurs at Luminy and the Institut Henri Poincaré ( Paris), and as a visiting scientist at Isis Pharmaceuticals Inc. in California.
In 2005, IRIC recruited François Major to develop a bioinformatics core facility to study data generated by the Institute’s various technological tools. Dr. Major has also set up his own computational and theoretical biology research team at the Institute to study RNA structure and function. At the same time, he continues to improve the MC-Sym software and is now developing other software to predict the tertiary structure of RNA and proteins from sequence data, study natural microRNAs, develop microRNAs that target several genes at once, analyze DNA microchip results, and study integrative bioinformatics.
With the help of these computational tools, Dr. Major hopes one day to resolve fundamental questions about cellular function, particularly in the area of gene expression. Although bioinformatics is not yet able to generate knowledge, he believes that it can help formulate hypotheses that can move the discovery process forward.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
Ensterö M, Daniel C, Wahlstedt H, Major F, Ohman M. Recognition and coupling of A-to-I edited sites are determined by the tertiary structure of the RNA, Nucleic Acids Res. (accepted).
Parisien M, Almeida Cruz J, Westhof E, Major F (2009) New metrics for comparing and assessing discrepancies between RNA 3D structures and models, RNA (in press).
McGraw AP, Mokdad A, Major F, Bevilacqua PC, Babitzke P (2009) Molecular basis of TRAP-5¹SL RNA interaction in the Bacillus subtilis trp operon transcription attenuation mechanism. RNA Jan;15(1):55-66.
Parisien M, Major F (2008) The MC-Fold and MC-Sym pipeline infers RNA structure from sequence data. Nature, 452(7183):51-55.
Lisi V, Major F (2007) A comparative analysis of the triloops in all high-resolution RNA structures reveals sequence-structure relationships, RNA, 13(9):1537-1545.
Parisien M, Major F (2007) Ranking the Factors that Contribute to Protein ß-Sheet Folding, Proteins: Structure. Function and Bioinformatics 68(4):824-829.
St-Onge K, Thibault P, Hamel S, Major F (2007) Modeling RNA motifs by graph-grammars, Nucleic Acids Res. 35(5):1726-1736.
Sylvestre Y, De Guire V, Querido E, Mukhopadhyay UK, Bourdeau V, Major F, Ferbeyre G, Chartrand P (2007) An E2F/miR-20a autoregulatory feedback loop. J Biol Chem 282:2135-2143
Lemieux S, Major F (2006) Automated extraction and classification of RNA tertiary structure cyclic motifs. Nucleic Acids Res, 34(8):3240-3246.
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