Monica Riley

After graduating from Smith College with a chemistry degree in 1947, she studied Biochemistry at University of California Berkeley with Pardee.^[1][2] Her Ph.D. work, together with the PaJaMo experiment, ruled out ribosomes as carriers of information to synthesize protein, leading to the discovery of messenger RNA.^[3] After holding faculty positions at University of California Davis and Stony Brook University, she moved to the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, staying there until age 80.^[2]

As a senior scientist at MBL she was one of the four founding faculty members of the Josephine Bay Paul Center for Comparative Molecular Biology and Evolution led by Mitchell Sogin.^[4] During this time, she co-founded the EcoCyc database of Escherichia coli metabolism,^[5] leading the curation of metabolic pathways and genome information for Escherichia coli for over a decade,^[6] and developed classification systems for genes and proteins (including MultiFun), which were forerunners of gene ontology.^[1][2]

• Blattner, F. R. (1997-09-05). "The Complete Genome Sequence of Escherichia coli K-12". Science. 277 (5331): 1453–1462. doi:10.1126/science.277.5331.1453. PMID 9278503.
• Riley, M. (2006-01-08). "Escherichia coli K-12: a cooperatively developed annotation snapshot--2005". Nucleic Acids Research. 34 (1): 1–9. doi:10.1093/nar/gkj405. ISSN 0305-1048. PMC 1325200. PMID 16397293.
• Karp, P. D. (2002-01-01). "The EcoCyc Database". Nucleic Acids Research. 30 (1): 56–58. doi:10.1093/nar/30.1.56. PMC 99147. PMID 11752253.
• Riley, M (1993-12-01). "Functions of the gene products of Escherichia coli". Microbiological Reviews. 57 (4): 862–952. doi:10.1128/mr.57.4.862-952.1993. PMC 372942. PMID 7508076.