Peter Karp

Technical Director, Artificial Intelligence Center

Peter Karp, Ph.D., Technical Director of the Bioinformatics Research Group at SRI International, works in the interdisciplinary field of bioinformatics, which develops computer-science methods for managing and analyzing the burgeoning quantities of biological data and knowledge.

Karp has been a pioneer in metabolic-pathway bioinformatics. His group has developed a metabolic-pathway database called EcoCyc that charts the complete biochemical factory within an Escherichia coli cell. His group has also developed algorithms for visualization of metabolic networks, for predicting anti-bacterial drug targets within metabolic networks, and for predicting the metabolic pathways of an organism whose genome has been sequenced. The latter algorithm has been applied to thousands of organisms to produce the BioCyc database collection.

Karp has authored more than 190 publications in computer science and  bioinformatics.  He is an SRI Fellow, a Fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Recent publications

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  • Revisiting the y-ome of Escherichia coli

    EcoCyc.org, the most comprehensive curated genome database for the model microorganism E. coli K-12, has implemented a new categorization schema that indicates the degree to which a gene has been…

  • Visual Analysis of Multi-Omics Data

    Abstract We present a tool for multi-omics data analysis that enables simultaneous visualization of up to four types of omics data on organism-scale metabolic network diagrams. The tool’s interactive web-based…

  • The Comparative Genome Dashboard

    The Comparative Genome Dashboard is a web-based software tool for interactive exploration of the similarities and differences in gene functions between organisms.

  • The Genome Explorer Genome Browser

    In this paper we report on a major update to our browser, Genome Explorer, that provides nearly instantaneous scaling and traversing of a genome, enabling users to quickly and easily…

  • An Evaluation of ChatGPT and Bard (Gemini) in the Context of Biological Knowledge Retrieval

    We evaluate the effectiveness of chatbots in retrieving biological knowledge for curation and research purposes.

  • CyanoCyc Cyanobacterial Web Portal

    CyanoCyc is a web portal that integrates an exceptionally rich database collection of information about cyanobacterial genomes with an extensive suite of bioinformatics tools.