Heng Li Credits Durbin Pedigree in Accepting Franklin Award

By Shraddha Chakradhar  

April 26, 2012 | BOSTON – Heng Li, a research scientist at the Broad Institute, paid tribute to his former advisor as he became the fourth former member of the Richard Durbin lab at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute to win the Benjamin Franklin Award for Open Access in the Life Sciences. 
Li was presented with the award this week by Jeff Bizzaro, president of the Bioinformatics Organization, which has more than 30,000 members, all of whom were able to participate in the nomination process for the award. Li received this year’s honor after being deemed a “fundamental contributor to widely-used Open Source software” by his nominators for his role in developing many standard sequencing analysis tools.

Li is a founder and developer of some of the best-known tools available for DNA and RNA sequencing, namely SAMtools, BWA, MAQ, TreeSoft and TreeFam.  Originally from China, Li began his career at BGI (formerly the Beijing Genomics Institute), before joining the Durbin lab in Cambridge, UK. It was there, according to Li, that he really began developing sequencing tools.

Li began his acceptance speech by listing Benjamin Franklin’s many accomplishments and when he read out “helped draft the Declaration of Independence,” he politely added, “Yes, we studied American history in China!” His objective in the ode to Franklin was to set up a parallel between the Revolutionary hero’s many contributions and the influential contributions of the Durbin team.   

“Franklin made many contributions to the world, and in bioinformatics and computational biology, there have been several groups that have made long-time contributions to the community,” said Li. He noted that past Franklin Award winners Sean Eddy, Ewan Birney, and Alex Bateman also trained with Durbin.   

Li outlined how each member of the team had worked over a span of more than twenty years to develop databases, software and formats for various gene sequencing capabilities.   

When told of the latest award, Li reported Durbin told him, “It must be like we have some inside track.” “But, of course, we don’t,” Li added.  

In laying out the many tools and resources created by this illustrious group, Li emphasized a true spirit of collaboration. “All of this from a single group,” he said, “and it is all open source.”   

TreeFam, for instance, is a database of phylogenetic trees of animal genes enabling any animal genome to be compared to thousands of other genomes and accurately placed within a particular group. MAQ (Map and Assembly Qualities), of which Li is the chief developer, is a set of programs that maps short reads onto reference genomes and assembles a unified genome.  

On the importance of open source data, Li said, “[Now] it’s not knowledge, but the way you reach, or get, it that’s important.”