Faculty Members
FRITH Martin
(Professor/Division of Biosciences)
Department of Computational Biology and Medical Sciences/Computational Biology
Career Summary
1996: B.A., Physics and Philosophy, University of Oxford
1997: Part III of the Mathematical Tripos, University of Cambridge
2004: Ph.D., Bioinformatics, Boston University
2004-2007: Postdoctoral fellow, University of Queensland & RIKEN
2007-2012: Researcher, Computational Biology Research Center, AIST
2012-present: Senior Researcher, AIST
2016-present: Professor, University of Tokyo
Educational Activities
Occasional lectures on bio-molecule sequence analysis
Research Activities
Study of bio-molecule sequence evolution (rearrangements, gene fusion, frameshifts, etc.)
Computational and statistical methods for finding and aligning related sequences.
Literature
1) Frith MC, Kawaguchi R. "Split-alignment of genomes finds orthologies more accurately." Genome Biol. 2015
16:106.
2) Sheetlin SL, Park Y, Frith MC, Spouge JL. "Frameshift alignment: statistics and post-genomic applications."
Bioinformatics. 2014 30(24):3575-82.
3) Frith MC; FANTOM consortium. "Explaining the correlations among properties of mammalian promoters."
Nucleic Acids Res. 2014 Apr;42(8):4823-32.
4) Frith MC. "A new repeat-masking method enables specific detection of homologous sequences." Nucleic Acids
Res. 2011 39(4):e23.
Future Plan
Deciphering the information in genome sequences will take many, many years. I hope to make breakthroughs by imagining and testing creative hypotheses, and focusing on inadequately-explained or neglected phenomena.
Messages to Students
I hope to build a welcoming international research group, with a fertile exchange of biological ideas and computational methods, combining the best of Japan and the rest of the world.