Dr Henrik Nielsen

Henrik Nielsen is an Associate Professor in the Section for Bioinformatics, Department of Health Technology, Technical University of Denmark. He holds an MSc in Biology from University of Copenhagen (1993), and a PhD in Theoretical Biochemistry from Stockholm University (1999). He has worked most of his career at the Technical University of Denmark, first at the Center for Biological Sequence Analysis, which has now transformed into Section for Bioinformatics.
Henrik Nielsen’s main research interest has always been the prediction of protein subcellular location in all domains of life. Where is the information that tells the cell where to put which proteins, and what is the nature of this information? His most well-known contribution to the field is the program and web site SignalP which predicts secretory signal peptides. The SignalP web server is used more than 1,000 times daily, and thousands of users have downloaded the program for use at their own computers. SignalP has been based on artificial neural networks and hidden Markov models, but the latest version (6.0), which was published in early 2022, is based on protein language models.