Martin Steinegger

Martin Steinegger is a bioinformatician and associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences at Seoul National University. His research focuses on computational methods for large-scale analysis of biological sequence and structure data. He is known for developing the bioinformatics tools MMseqs2, Linclust, ColabFold, and Foldseek, and contributed to the development of AlphaFold2. In 2024, he received the Overton Prize from the International Society for Computational Biology. and Linclust, which clusters protein sequence datasets in linear time. These tools are used in resources including UniRef, NCBI ClusteredNR, and RCSB PDB sequence clusters. His Conterminator software, built on MMseqs2, was used to identify over two million contaminated or mislabeled database entries.

He later co-developed ColabFold, an open platform described as making AlphaFold2 protein structure prediction more accessible to experimental biologists. He also co-developed Foldseek, a tool for protein structure search. Nature Methods described Foldseek as a major acceleration in protein structure database searches, while Nature reported on its adoption as the search tool for the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database. In 2026, Nature reported that Steinegger was part of a consortium with EMBL-EBI, Google DeepMind, and NVIDIA that expanded the AlphaFold database to include homodimer predictions.

Steinegger co-authored the 2021 Nature paper on AlphaFold and contributed the BFD sequence database used in the system.

Awards and honors Overton Prize, International Society for Computational Biology (2024) Highly Cited Researcher, Clarivate (2024, 2025)