About us

Bioinformatics is becoming an important field in molecular biology, due to explosive amount of data produced by genome-scale analysis of biological system ranging from DNA sequence to cell, and demand for computational tools for analyzing those data. Thus, there are two major missions of bioinformatics: (1) Integration of biological data, and (2) Development of analysis tools. Since complete genome sequences of many organisms have been determined, many researchers are interested in functional analyses of genomes, as exemplified by emerging new fields such as structural genomics, proteome, transcriptome analyses and so on. Thus, bioinformatics will have to provide not only general-purpose databases and tools but also more specialized databases and tools directly related to individual research acitivities.

We have been developing various databases related to structure and function of biomolecules and trying to integrate different kinds of information. We are also developing analysis tools for proteins and interactions with nucleic acids and ligands. Some of databases and tools are already on the Internet, and we plan to release them as soon as they are ready. In order to develop new databases and tools, we carry out basic research on biomolecules. For more information on our activities, please see individual pages.