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C. Robin Buell is a researcher in genomics and bioinformatics, including the genome biology of plants and plant-associated organisms. Her institutional research description emphasizes comparative genomics and the provision of databases and computational tools for interpreting genomes.^[ref]

Buell was first author of the 2003 complete genome sequence report for Pseudomonas syringae pathovar tomato DC3000. The publication described approximately $6.5$ million base pairs, distributed across one circular chromosome and two plasmids, with $5763$ predicted open reading frames. These are the study's reported assembly and annotation results, rather than an assertion that later annotations must retain exactly the same counts.^[ref]

An illuminating distinction is the difference between a sequence measurement and its interpretation. DNA sequencing supplies evidence for the order of nucleotides; genome annotation identifies candidate features and proposes their biological roles. An open reading frame is therefore not, by itself, a demonstration that a particular protein is expressed or has a proposed function. Independent evidence can test those additional claims.

The published scale also gives a useful arithmetic check. Dividing the approximate genome size by its predicted open reading frame count givesbase pairs of total genome sequence per predicted open reading frame. This is a bookkeeping ratio, not a mean coding-sequence length: its numerator includes noncoding sequence, and the annotation may contain overlapping features. Confusing these quantities would turn a reasonable summary of genome density into an incorrect claim about individual genes. This example shows why the definitions of both numerator and denominator matter when interpreting large biological datasets.

Researcher in bioinformatics. With William R. Pearson, Lipman developed improved tools for biological sequence alignment, connecting computational search methods with the comparison of biological sequences.^[ref]

Researcher in bioinformatics and phylogenetic nomenclature. With collaborators, developed the Phyloreference Exchange Format, which makes definitions of clades computable and exchangeable rather than leaving their meaning only in prose. This connects named groups with explicit definitions that can be evaluated on a phylogenetic tree.^[ref]

Researcher in bioinformatics who, with Steven Henikoff, developed amino acid substitution matrices from conserved protein blocks. These matrices turn observed replacement patterns into scores for protein sequence alignment.^[ref]

Researcher in bioinformatics who coauthored a study of gene names corrupted in scientific spreadsheets. Automatic conversion of gene symbols into dates or other formats can alter identifiers without an obvious warning, making data handling part of scientific reproducibility.^[ref]

Researcher in bioinformatics and coauthor of the original BLAST paper. The work made local sequence similarity searchable efficiently, connecting biological sequence alignment with a practical database-search algorithm.^[ref]

Researcher in chromatin biology and bioinformatics. With Jorja G. Henikoff, Henikoff developed amino acid substitution matrices from conserved protein blocks; these provide empirically grounded scores for comparing protein sequences.^[ref]

Researcher in bioinformatics. With David J. Lipman, Pearson developed tools for biological sequence comparison that became associated with FASTA, making similarity searches practical for growing sequence collections.^[ref]