MEGA Scientists

Sudhir Kumar likes to draw trees of life. He’s been drawing them since the early 1990s. Computers make the job a bit easier. But in the early days, Kumar could not find a reliable computer program to help with his drawing.

The ASU researcher refused to be stymied. He solved the problem by starting from scratch and writing his own program. Molecular Evolutionary and Genetic Analysis (MEGA) was the first user-friendly genetics software in the world designed for the Microsoft Windows platform.

MEGA 1.0 was developed and released as a tool for the scientific community in 1994. Today, updated versions of MEGA allow anyone to become an armchair evolutionary biologist and study the history of life on Earth.

Kumar says that the program has become a popular worldwide tool. More than 20,000 users have downloaded the software, which Kumar provides to the research community free of charge.

Kumar’s “chief technical officer” with software development is Joel Dudley, an ASU faculty research associate. Dudley spends lots of time managing the day-to-day duties related to launching the newest version of the software, called MEGA3.

Dudley has a background in microbiology. But he is a computer programmer whose ability is almost innate.

“I never took a computer science class in my life,” Dudley says. “It’s just something I knew I liked to do. I learn faster and more when I learn by myself.”

Dudley faces daily programming challenges as he helps debug MEGA3. But that is the way he likes it.

“The people in our lab are doing things that have never been tried before. There is no way you can reference anything,” he says.

To succeed, Dudley has learned to be a cunning computer language multi-linguist.

“You have to pretty nimble when it comes to dealing with different computer languages,” Dudley adds. “In a single day it is not unusual at all for me to use languages like PERL, PHP, Delphi, and C/C++.” Time is precious in the world of high-level research. Scientists covet tools and software that are relatively easy to learn and use.

“There is nothing as user-friendly as MEGA,” Dudley says. The ASU team thinks that MEGA3 will fuel innovation and help scientists make new discoveries. The software is just one example of tools being developed in Kumar’s lab. It will be important to future work done by members of his Evolutionary Functional Genomics group at the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University.—Joe Caspermeyer