Invited talk (4): 2:35 p.m. - 3:10 p.m.
Sticking to the Analyses of Genome Sequence Data
Speaker
Kenta Nakai, Professor, Human Genome Center, Institute of Medical Science, University of Tokyo, Japan
Abstract
I once belonged to the Institute for Chemical Research from 1986 to 1991 as a graduate student and an assistant professor. At that time, there was no such word as bioinformatics but the sizes of DNA/protein sequence databases had already been expanding rapidly. Naturally I became interested in the analysis of nucleic acid information, which was indeed the name of a facility in the institute. More specifically, I wanted to develop computational methods for interpreting what is (ultimately) encoded in DNA sequences. Since then, I have pursued this research interest for 20 years but there have been significant changes in the field: after a great rise of the demand to sequence analysis due to genome projects, there was a fall with the popularity of network analyses. But recently there seems to be a renewed interest in sequence analysis due to the advent of so-called next-generation sequencers. Many mysteries remain unsolved: especially, we do not understand well how the regulatory information of gene expression is composed on DNA sequences. In this symposium, I will introduce some of our efforts in this direction.