bic logo Kyoto University Bioinformatics Center
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     Overview  
 
History
The Institute for Chemical Research of Kyoto University was establishment in 1915. Despite its naming, the Institute is involved in wide-ranging research areas, not only in chemistry but also in physics and biology, and has contributed to promoting interdisciplinary research areas and developing innovative technologies. In 1985 a new laboratory was established for interdisciplinary research encompassing biological science and computer science. This was the beginning of the Kanehisa Laboratory. The Kanehisa Laboratory became responsible for the informatics part of the Japanese Human Genome Project by 1990, introduced a supercomputer system for computational molecular biology in 1991, started the GenomeNet service in 1992, and initiated the KEGG project in 1995. When the Human Genome Project was nearing to an end, it was apparent that the interdisciplinary research area, by then called bioinformatics, would play major roles in the biological science of the 21st Century, which is bound to be a genome-based information science. Thus, the Bioinformatics Center in the Institute for Chemical Research, Kyoto University was established in April 2001.
Groups
The Bioinformatics Center has four groups: three research laboratories and the KEGG Database Development Team.

Group Professor Associate Professor
Senior Lecturer
Assistant Professor Graduate School
Chemical
Life Science
Hiroyuki Ogata Hisashi Endo
Yusuke Okazaki
Hiroyuki Hikida
Science
Pharmaceutical Sciences
Mathematical
Bioinformatics
Tatsuya Akutsu Takeyuki Tamura Tomoya Mori Informatics
Bio-knowledge
Engineering
Hiroshi Mamitsuka Canh Hao Nguyen Pharmaceutical Sciences

KEGG Database Development Team Minoru Kanehisa
(Specially Appointed
Professor)
Research
The Bioinformatics Center aims at developing new informatics technologies for deciphering the genome, especially from the viewpoint of how life operates as a system, and promoting both basic and applied research areas in bioinformatics. The Center consists of three research laboratories, named Chemical Life Science, Mathematical Bioinformatics, and Bio-Knowledge Engineering, which focus on scientific discovery, algorithms, and data mining, respectively.
Education
The three Laboratories in the Bioinformatics Center belong to the three Graduate Schools of Kyoto University: Biological Science, Information Science, and Pharmaceutical Science. In addition, the Center has developed and implemented its own bioinformatics education system with the following programs.
Resource
The GenomeNet service was first made available on September 1, 1992 with primitive e-mail queries for keyword search and sequence similarity search. The GenomeNet Web service was launched on July 1, 1994 and the first release of KEGG was made on December 1, 1995. Since then KEGG has become one of the major databases in biomedical science, receiving tens of thousands of visitors per day.
Founder
Dr. Minoru Kanehisa, professor emeritus and specially appointed professor of Kyoto University, is the founder and the first director of the Bioinformatics Center and received the "Clarivate Citation Laureates" in 2018. The 46 scholars among the 300 scholars chosen for this award have won the Nobel prize. Dr. Kanehisa is the 26th Clarivate Citation Laureate in Japan.

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