Research Area

Systems biology

Biology has been significantly advanced by a reductive approach. Huge biological data set, such as more than 1,000 genome sequences, has been causing a paradigm shift into a holistic approach to understand living things as systems. Now we start to sutdy the approaches by modelling several biological systems to elucidate cullular mechanisms.

Network analysis

With a development of omics technologies, it becomes imperative to systematically analyze all biological components (genes, mRNA, proteins and metabolites). To attain this task, we have developed a clustering algorithm (DPClus) to extract highly connected clusters.

Transcriptome

Transcriptome is defined as a total set of transcripts in an organism. To elucidate transcriptome networks, we study transcriptome analysis by microarray and new generation sequencers with use of BL-SOM and novel methods.

Feature Map: Expression Profile in Bacillus subtilis

Metabolome

Cell consists of a couple of thounsands molecules. Of those, metabolites are mainly produced by enzymatic reactions. The objective of metabolome analysis is to comprehensively find out particular metabolites which affect the cellular networks. As metabolome analysis platform, we have developed a species-metabolite database, KNApSAcK, covered almost all reported metabolites. Now, 50,048 metabolites and 101,500 species-metabolite relationships are accumulated.