The future of Phyre

[Lawrence Kelley]

Dear all,

Hello! I am the developer of Phyre2.

I am glad so many of you have found the server to be of value over the years. 

The last couple of years has been extremely difficult. 

In 2018 we lost one of our most talented post-docs to a far higher paid job in finance.

In 2019 we lost our second post-doc to a hedge fund in London with a salary triple what academia could offer.

Now we are left, as we started, with just me.

This difficulty of acquiring and retaining the necessary talent to maintain and develop this server has led to my decision to leave science. I will be departing around Dec 2020.

I have worked very hard for almost 20 years to bring powerful bioinformatic tools to non-bioinformatician biologists in a sufficiently easy-to-use form so that great ideas in biology can be tested.

I think this has been a great success. Thousands of citations of the Phyre papers and wonderful feedback from users convinces me that this has all been extremely useful to the bioscience community.

I am sorry to leave, but the "funding games" that need to be played to ensure survival have grown so tiresome to me that full (and early) retirement for me is my best option.

We were about 75% complete with the new improved Phyre3 around Jan 2019. But the rather sudden departure of our very talented post-doc who developed the infrastructure for Phyre3 has made it impossible for me to pick up the pieces.

Phyre will continue and Phyre3 will appear at some point. We (or rather the lab) has good funding and will endeavour to hire the best people to continue this work.

I want to offer my sincerest thanks to all those who have used our server and cited it, to all those who have written glowing endorsements as letters of support and for generally being a kind and generous community who help each other on this forum.

All the best,

Lawrence