Chris Ponting was trained in physics (BA, Oxford, UK), particle physics (MSc, UBC, Canada) and structural biophysics (DPhil, Oxford, UK). His interest in biology arose around the same time as the tide of genetic sequence information began to rise. Funded by MRC and Wellcome Trust Fellowships for most of the 1990s, Chris forged a productive collaboration with Peer Bork (EMBL, Heidelberg) with whom he designed and developed the SMART web-based protein annotation tool. In 1998 he left the UK to take up a year-long NRC Senior Associateship at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NIH, USA). In 1999 he returned to Oxford to join the MRC Functional Genomics Unit as Programme Leader, and became a Professor of Bioinformatics in 2002.

Chris Ponting's research focuses on evolution of genes and genomes using comparative genomics methods. The group contributed to the publicly-funded Human Genome Project described in Nature (2001 & 2004), and performed much of the protein comparisons for the mouse (2002), rat (2004) and chicken (2004) Genome Projects, also published in Nature. Our work has the important benefit of reducing the number of animals used in experiments. It also provides fascinating insights into how evolution has shaped our genomes and genes, and how we are different from one another.  Secondly, the group is also interested in the prediction of structure, function and evolution of genes of interest to the biomedical community in general, and to the groups of the MRC Functional Genomics Unit in particular. We contributed to the understanding of the function and evolution of genes implicated in asthma, Alzheimer's disease and muscular dystrophies.

Further information can be found at Ponting Research