20 years of Rfam

20 years of building RNA families - come celebrate with us

In the past 20 years Rfam has changed significantly. It began with only 25 families and as of 2022, it contains over 4000 families. Since starting it has undergone 13 major updates, has integrated with Wikipedia, transitioned to SVN from RCS, switched to Infernal from COVE, moved between institutions and more.

None of this would be possible without the excellent people that have worked on Rfam over the past 20 years. We would like to thank everyone who has worked on Rfam for their contributions. Here are a few of the responsible people, past and present, discussing Rfam's changes over the years.


Birthday cake collage

Birthday Celebrations

Thank you so much to everyone who helped us celebrate 20 years of Rfam at RNA Benasque 2022. It was amazing to share this ocassion with many past and present team members. And the cake was delicious!

Alex Bateman

Alex Bateman is the current and founding team leader for Rfam. Currently he is a Senior Team Leader at EMBL-EBI.

Sam Griffiths-Jones

Sam Griffiths-Jones is the founding project leader of Rfam. He is a Professor at University of Manchester and develops and maintains miRBase.

Sean Eddy

Sean Eddy is the founding PI of Rfam. Currently, he is an HHMI Investigator, and the chair of MCB at Harvard.

Sarah Burge

Sarah Burge was a project leader for Rfam, and currently is the Director for Clinical Integration at CRUK.

Elena Rivas

Elena Rivas is collaborator and user of Rfam. She is a Senior Research Fellow and Lecturer Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard University.

Paul Gardner

Paul Gardner was a project leader for Rfam and is currently an associate professor at University of Otago, New Zealand.

Eric Nawrocki

Eric Nawrocki is a collaborator and the developer of Infernal. Currently he is a staff scientist at the NCBI.

Anton Petrov

Anton Petrov is a former project leader from 2015 to 2022.

Nancy Ontiveros

Nancy Ontiveros is the current Biocurator for Rfam.

Emma Cooke

Emma Cooke is the current software developer for Rfam.

Blake Sweeney

Blake Sweeney is the current project leader for Rfam.