Sequence analysis
He has developed numerous methods for computational sequence analysis. These include gene finding (e.g. GeneWise) with Ewan Birney and Hidden Markov models for protein and nucleic acid alignment and matching (e.g. HMMER) with Sean Eddy and Graeme Mitchison. A standard textbook "Biological Sequence analysis" coauthored with Sean Eddy, Anders Krogh and Graeme Mitchison describes some of this work. Using these methods Durbin worked with colleagues to build a series of important genomic data resources, including the protein family database Pfam, the genome database Ensembl, and the gene family database TreeFam.