David W. Ussery

David Wayne Ussery is an American bioinformatician, academic, and author. He is a professor in the Department of Physiological Sciences, in the College of Veterinary Medicine at Oklahoma State University, where he is the director for the INTERACT (Interdisciplinary Network for Tracking Emerging Risks, Analytics, and Comparative Translational genomics) program . Before coming to OSU, he was a professor in both the Department of Physiology and Cell Biology and the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) and holds the Helen G. Adams/ARA Endowed Chair in BioMedical Informatics.

Ussery's research has focused on bioinformatic analysis of bacterial genomes and has published a textbook in the discipline of Comparative Genomics, titled Computing for Comparative Microbial Genomics: Bioinformatics for Microbiologists. His notable contributions include a course on Comparative Genomics, and publications in journals, including the Journal of Clinical Microbiology, Nucleic Acids Research, and Advances in Genome Biology.

Ussery led the Comparative Genomics Group at Oak Ridge National Labs and the Comparative Microbial Genomics group at the Technical University of Denmark, as well as served on the Board of the Genomic Standards Consortium (GSC).

Education Ussery completed his B.A. in Chemistry at William Jewell College in 1982 and his M.Sc. in Physical Chemistry at the University of New Mexico in 1986. Later, he earned his Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine in 1993. He completed his post doctoral training at Institute of Molecular Medicine at Oxford University from 1992 to 1995. Later, he characterized and analyzed the genome of Aspergillus niger CBS 513.88 through comparative genomics and metabolic modeling, providing insights into its versatile metabolism, protein secretion mechanisms, hydrolytic enzyme production, and biosynthetic pathways for secondary metabolites. He co-developed RNAmmer, a computational tool that annotated ribosomal RNA genes using hidden Markov models. A Genome Atlas for the main E. coli chromosome. The atlas in this figure is for K-12 strain, isolate MG1655, first published in 1997 (GenBank accession U00096). Ussery introduced the Minimum Information about a Genome Sequence (MIGS) specification. He also developed a web-based approach for multilocus sequence typing (MLST) using whole-genome sequencing (WGS) data, providing a method for bacterial strain identification across 66 species. Furthermore, he devised a reference-free method for genome assembly and genetic element identification in complex metagenomic samples.

In addition to his research publications, Ussery co-authored a textbook in the discipline of Comparative Genomics, titled Computing for Comparative Microbial Genomics: Bioinformatics for Microbiologists. This work provided a foundational understanding of comparative microbial genomics, presenting computational methods, practical applications, and analytical frameworks for studying microbial genome sequences and ecological interactions. 2016 – Fellow Award, Arkansas Research Alliance