Address from CBRC: 10:25 a.m. - 10:45 a.m.
Power of continuation
Speaker
Kiyoshi Asai, Director, Computational Biology Research Center, Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Japan
Abstract
Ten years ago, two centers of bioinformatics were established, one in Kyoto and another in Tokyo. The former is the Bioinformatics Center, Institute of Chemical Research, Kyoto University, and the latter is Computational Biology Research Center (CBRC), AIST. Two centers have been contributing to the field of bioinformatics both in new findings in biology and development of bioinformatics resources: algorithms, software and databases. Development of bioinformatics resources can achieve a great success by continuing the effort in a consistent manner, as we can recognize in the case of KEGG database, which is now appreciated in all over the international society. The other center, CBRC has developed a number of algorithms and software, which I hopefully think comparative to those in Bioinformatics Center, a few databases not as highly accessed as KEGG, and more importantly, survived the same ten years.
Continuation plays more important role in education/training of the researchers, which is another important activity of an research institute. A few of the researchers in CBRC were educated/trained by Prof. Kanehisa. I hope both research centers will survive at least another ten years, and CBRC will share the responsibility with the Bioinformatics Center, of educating/training researchers, as well as contributing by publications and resource development.