Genome Informatics Project

Genome Informatics Project 1991-1995
Principal Investigator: Minoru Kanehisa, Kyoto University and University of Tokyo

The Genome Informatics Project was initiated in April 1991 as a part of the first five-year MESSC (Ministry of Education, Science, Sports and Culture) Human Genome Program headed by Kenichi Matsubara of Osaka University. The project was instrumental in establishing new research areas bridging biological science and computer science and developing new computational technologies for genome research. The result is the GenomeNet Database Service which has since been operated by the Supercomputer Laboratory (SCL) of Kyoto University, in collaboration with the Human Genome Center (HGC) of the University of Tokyo. Most of the standard molecular biology databases were made accessible through WWW, Gopher, e-mail, on-line guest accounts, and special client programs. In addition, new database systems that had been developed by HGC and a number of researchers in collaboration and unique databases organized by scientists in the Japanese research community were made available through the GenomeNet anonymous FTP service.

• List of Publications - Genome Informatics Project 1991-1995
• List of Publications (In Japanese)
• Activity Reports (In Japanese) - Genome Informatics Project 1991-1995
• Genome Informatics News (1993-1996)
• Methods in Computational Molecular Biology (July 1996)

Genome Informatics Project 1996-2000
Principal Investigator: Minoru Kanehisa, Kyoto University

The continuation of the first five-year project was started in April 1996 under the second five-year MESSC Human Genome Program headed by Yoshiyuki Sakaki of the University of Tokyo. In this new project more emphasis was placed on the data collection and knowledge organization, but the technology development efforts also continued. As the genome sequencing projects of different organisms started producing catalogs of genes and gene products, it became extremely important to computerize functional data in order to use them as reference knowledge for prediction. One such effort is KEGG (Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes), which is an attempt to comuterize knowledge of molecular and cellular biology in terms of wiring diagrams of genes and gene products. Furthermore, new computational methods have been developed for handling and analyzing systematic data generated by functional genomics experiments, such as for predicting networks of ineteracting genes from microarray gene expression profiles.

• List of Publications - Genome Informatics Project 1996-2000
• List of Publications (In Japanese)
• Activity Reports (In Japanese) - Genome Informatics Project 1996-2000

Last updated: March 10, 2000