A grand challenge in the genome science of the 21st century is to computationally predict systemic functional behaviors of the cell, the organism, and the ecosystem from genomic and molecular information, especially for the purpose of medical, industrial, and other practical applications. This will require new bioinformatics, not simply for screening large-scale data, but rather for reconstructing the system and computing its interactions with the environment. While traditional genomics and other types of omics approaches have contributed to our understanding of the genomic space of possible genes and proteins that make up the biological system, new chemical genomics initiatives will give us a glimpse of the chemical space of possible compounds and reactions that exist as an interface between the biological system and the natural environment.

    The 21st Century Center of Excellence (COE) program entitled "Knowledge Information Infrastructure for Genome Science" is a joint venture between the Bioinformatics Center of the Institute for Chemical Research and the School of Pharmaceutical Sciences in Kyoto University, with support from the Ministry of Education, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan. The program aims at developing bioinformatics technologies to reconstruct the biological system and its environment by integrating our knowledge on the genomic space and the chemical space, which will enable practical applications including drug discovery and personalized medicine. In addition, a new education/training program is being introduced, integrating traditional bioinformatics with physics and chemistry and with medical and pharmaceutical sciences. The program also assists further developement of the KEGG resource (http://www.genome.jp/kegg/), by extending its PATHWAY collection to include wiring diagrams of both endogenous and exogenous molecules.