Dr. Wataru Iwasaki is an Associate Professor of Computational Biology at the University of Tokyo. He also serves as a Board Member of International Society for Computational Biology, the President of Japanese Society for Bioinformatics, a Representative of the Society of Evolutionary Studies, Japan, and a Board Member of the eDNA Society. He received Oxford Journals-Japanese Society for Bioinformatics Prize, Young Scientist Initiative Award from the Society of Evolutionary Studies, and the Commendation for Science and Technology by the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan.
Recent technological advancements are producing massive amount of data in biology. One of the most important aspects of this trend is that those data constitute strong infrastructures for investigation of non-model organisms. To uncover living strategies and evolution of non-model organisms effectively by taking full advantage of the ever-growing amount of data, novel approaches are definitely required.
In this talk, first, I will show the effectiveness of large-scale comparative genomics toward that goal, and introduce a new comparative genomic tool SonicParanoid for quick and accurate orthology inference. Second, I will present how comparative metagenomics, or “metagenomic metaanalysis”, can become effective in revealing microbial ecology and evolution using huge datasets. Third, I will present “metaepigenomics”, or how epigenomic data can be directly obtained from microbial communities without cultivation. Finally, a brand-new phylogenetic method, Graph-Splitting method, for reconstructing super-family scale phylogenetic trees without multiple sequence alignment will be presented.
References:
Kumagai, Yoshizawa, Nakajima, Watanabe, Fukunaga, Ogura, Hayashi, Oshima, Hattori, Ikeuchi, Kogure, DeLong, and Iwasaki. The ISME Journal, 12, 1329-1343. (2018)
Cosentino and Iwasaki. Bioinformatics, 35, 149-151. (2019)
Sriswasdi, Yang, and Iwasaki. Nature Communications, 8, 1162. (2017)
Hiraoka, Okazaki, Anda, Toyoda, Nakano, and Iwasaki. Nature Communications, 10, 159. (2019)
Matsui and Iwasaki. Systematic Biology, published online (doi: 10.1093/sysbio/syz049) (2019)