[[Japanese page>Bioinformatics Laboratory]]
Welcome to Bioinformatics Laboratory, Information Engineering, Niigata University.
*Research Fields of Interest [#o8b54834]
It is one of the most important tasks of life science to unveil unknown basic knowledge from a large amount of accumulated information of genomic sequences. Self-Organizing Map (SOM) is an effective tool for clustering and visualizing high-dimensional complex data on a two-dimensional map. We developed a modified SOM (Batch Learning SOM; BLSOM) for comprehensive analyses of species-specific genomic sequence characteristics.
**1. Comparative genome analyses for unveiling genome signature [#y3fe31c2]
We found that BLSOM could classify genomic sequence fragments according to species without any information other than oligonucleotide frequencies in a wide range of genomes. The BLSOM, which can systematically characterize species-specific genome signature of all prokaryotes and eukaryotes analyzable, proves a new powerful bioinformatics strategy to study biodiversity and molecular evolution.
**2. A novel bioinformatics strategy for unveiling microbial diversity and protein functions of metagenome sequences [#k3b95a05]
Metagenomic approach, which is the genome analysis on a mixture of uncultured microorganisms, has been recently developed to search for novel and industrially useful genes and to study microbial diversity in a wide variety of environments. Using a BLSOM, most of the sequences obtained by metagenomic studies were classified (self-organized) according to phylotypes without any phylogenetic information. Because the BLSOM is a powerful tool for phylogenetic classification of genomic fragments, BLSOM could provide a new systematic strategy for revealing basic knowledge obtained from uncultured microorganisms including viruses in a wide variety of environmental samples.