Research Center for Genomics and Bioinformatics

Innovative features of the Center

We have evolved our Molecular Evolutionary Genetics Analysis (MEGA) software, which has already received high reputations internationally, to run on from 32 bit to 64 bit operating systems. At this Research Center, graduate education for total research procedures with using high throughput DNA sequencers is possible in all areas from experimental data production to analytical software development. This kind of environment is particularly beneficial for young researchers.

Moreover, as a new version of MEGA (MEGA7), we developed MEGA-MD, a computer program that can predict disease causing genetic variations in human population by carrying out comparative analysis with the genomic information from animals other than humans. We came up with this idea from our basic research focusing not only on humans but also animals other than humans.

It is expected that from now on, the development of systems that enable anybody to use the enormous quantities of genomic data will advance and various directions are conceivable within that. However, at this Research Center, we are focusing on the area of phylogenetic analysis, which estimates phylogenetic relationships among genes, genomes and organisms using DNA sequence data, one of the fundamental bioinformatics technologies in life sciences. Advancing the development of high throughput DNA sequencers, the sequence data output are accumulating rapidly, faster than the performance of computer is improving, so the computation time increases as time goes on. We will concentrate on the development of theory and algorithms for computational methodology to efficiently analyze the enormous quantities of genomic data.