Ultimately, the capability for data mining of the system must be developed, and universal access must be assured. Within this context, the research projects of Altman and his group are directed at both infrastructure creation and the demonstration of the accomplishment of specific goals. There is room here to discuss only a few of the many projects ongoing in the group. Most recently, graduate student Liping Wei and Altman used the system to identify potential calcium-binding sites. Rather, the software found a combination of conditions at varying distances from a site, related to the placement of oxygen, amide, and carbonyl groups, to hydrophobicity and solvent accessibility, and other 'fuzzy' recognition qualities.
Ribosomes have two distinct subunit structures, a large unit and a small one.
He serves on the editorial boards of Computer Applications in the Biosciences, the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, and the International Journal of Medical Informatics., and he is an author or coauthor of some 30 refereed journal publications, as many refereed conference articles, nine book chapters, and four edited volumes of conference proceedings. He has also received many academic honors. In 1997, he became IBM Faculty Scholar and was granted a prestigious U.S. Presidential Early Career Award in a White House ceremony. This year he was named a Stanford Hume Faculty Scholar and received the annual Young Investigator Award of the Western Society of Clinical Investigators. He also served from 1993 to 1997 on the Steering Committee of SDSC and on the Executive Committee from 1995 to 1997.