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The Department of Computational Biology engages in transdisciplinary research in systems biology and bioinformatics. Traditionally, the biosciences have focused on elucidating the functions of genes, but in recent years global interest has increasingly shifted toward developing an understanding of living organisms as systems by quantitatively processing the massive volumes of data gained through genomic research. The central role in this endeavor is played by bioinformatics, the study of information science (informatics) as applied to biology. This discipline is not simply limited to the construction of databases or the development of analytical tools; it is widely recognized as providing the concepts and methods essential to acquiring a systematic understanding of living organisms.
Our department's transdisciplinary research activities comprise a core program of top-level subjects, including topics associated with pure information science, and several cooperative/inter-organizational courses that are focused on biological experimentation. The chief themes for our research include databases, machine learning, simulation, ontology, and systems biology, and added to them are such inter-organizational course keywords as cellular functional analysis, analysis of genetic diseases, genomics, and analysis of proteins' three-dimensional structures.
  Educational Program Features
We train students to be able to develop the information and biological observation technologies necessary for systematic comprehension of life phenomena, and to use those technologies to pioneer new fields in the biosciences. The curriculum is designed so that students can systematically learn computational biology from the ground up, regardless of whether their undergraduate background is in informatics, biology, or other disciplines.
Our educational program consists of seven laboratories covering the core courses, plus cooperating laboratories affiliated with the University of Tokyo's Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences and Institute of Medical Science, inter-organizational laboratories affiliated with the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), and RIKEN, as well as laboratories led by university faculty teams. Our more than 20 faculty members are nearly evenly divided between our informatics side and our biological experimentation side.
For more information, please see the faculty profile pages of this prospectus, or our department's (Web site http://www.cb.k.u-tokyo.ac.jp/).
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Department of Computational Biology
