19th International CODATA Conference
Category: Keynote

Comparative Genomics: A Bioinformatics-based Key Approach for Understanding our Genome

Yoshiyuki Sakaki (sakaki@gsc.riken.jp)
Director, RIKEN Genomic Sciences Center, Japan

Completion of the human genome established a solid platform for understanding our genome. However, the information obtained from the complete sequence is limited because of lack of our knowledge, and a large amount of and a large variety of genetic information encoded in the genome remain to be discovered. One of the most powerful approaches to this issue is a comparative analysis of the genomes from a variety organisms, that is, comparative genomics. For example, in an early stage of the human genome analysis, human-prosimian comparative analysis successfully discovered that a highly repetitive sequence family in the human genome is a retrotransposon encoding reversetranscriptase. More later, we also discovered a mammalian "clock" gene based on the human-Drosophila comparative genomics, which opened a door to mammalian clock biology. For these few years, a variety of genomes have been sequenced and comparative genomic analyses have been extensively done by many groups including ours. Human-mouse comparison revealed the presence of many highly conserved sequences, the function of which are unknown. Recent human-chimpanzee comparison provided a clue to understand the genetic basis of humanity. I would like to present the power of comparative genomics by presenting various examples, in which novel functional units of the genome were successfully discovered.