Antoine Danchin (born 7 May 1944) is a French geneticist. He is best known for his research in several fields of biology, from the structure and function of adenylate cyclase, to modelling of learning in the nervous system and the early development of genomics and bioinformatics. He is the Chairman of the startup AMAbiotics which specialises in metabolic bioremediation and synthetic biology. He was the director of the Department Genomes and Genetics at the Institut Pasteur in Paris where he headed the Genetics of Bacterial Genomes Unit. Early life and career He was trained as a mathematician at the Institut Henri Poincaré and a physicist at the École Normale Supérieure. Working first with Mildred Cohn, Marianne Grunberg-Manago and Ionel Solomon in Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, Danchin became an experimental microbiologist in the early seventies. He created with Philippe Courrège and Jean-Pierre Changeux at the in Paris, France, a working seminar where they worked together on the construction of mathematical models of learning and memory. Interested in University training he created, with Maurice Guéron, the first semester of Biology at the École Polytechnique, and developed his teaching during four years. Among his first students one can find Daniel Kahn, Patrick Charnay, and many others. The main goal of his research has been to try to understand how genes can function collectively in the cell. This led him to work on regulation systems which control global gene expression in bacteria. Part of his work was devoted to the study of the enzymes that synthesize cyclic AMP. He established the reference classification of adenylate cyclases after his laboratory successfully cloned and sequenced the genes of adenylyl cyclase toxins from the whooping cough agent as well as from the agent of anthrax. This work led him to trigger ethical reflections on the practices of molecular genetics and genomics at a time when this was not considered important. Danchin started in 1985 a collaboration with computer scientists for evaluation of artificial intelligence techniques to the study of integrated problems in molecular genetics. This convinced him that it was time to investigate genomes as wholes, provided that an important effort in computer sciences was initiated in parallel (in silico biology). Early in 1987 he proposed that a sequencing program should be undertaken for Bacillus subtilis. This proposal was actualized by a European joint effort on this genome, starting in 1988. The complete sequence was published in 1997.