Takashi Gojobori (五條堀 孝, Gojobori Takashi, born October 24, 1951, Fukuoka) is a Japanese molecular biologist, Vice-Director of the National Institute of Genetics (NIG) and the DNA Data Bank of Japan (DDBJ) at NIG, in Mishima, Japan. Gojobori is a Distinguished Professor[1] at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Thuwal, Saudi Arabia. He is a Professor of Bioscience and Acting Director at the Computational Bioscience Research Center at KAUST.[1]

Takashi Gojobori
Takashi Gojobori at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, November 2018
Born (1951-10-24) October 24, 1951 (age 73)
Fukuoka, Japan
NationalityJapanese
Alma materKyushu University
Awards
Scientific career
Fields
Institutions
Doctoral studentsPrince Akishino[citation needed]

He has also been co-appointed as the Special Research Consultant of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), and acts as a visiting professor of Keio University, University of Tokyo, and Tokyo Institute of Technology.

He is an Associate Member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), a Member of Academia Europea and an Academician Member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Vatican.

Education

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Gojobori finished his Ph.D. in Theoretical Population Genetics (1979) at Kyushu University, Japan. He was a research associate and research assistant professor at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) for 4 years (1979–1983). He was also visiting assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis (1985, 1986) and visiting research fellow at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (ICRF) in London (1989).

Research

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He is the Founding Editor of the journal Genome Biology and Evolution, the Executive Editor of the journal Gene, Academic Editor of FEBS Letters, Associate Editor of Molecular Biology and Evolution and PLOS Genetics, and Section Editor of Computer Genomics in BMC Genomics. He has served on the editorial boards of 6 international journals including GigaScience. Previously he was the Editor of Journal of Molecular Evolution for 8 years (1995–2003).[citation needed] He is leader of the Japanese team of the H-Invitational international consortium who was tasked with creating a database linking the 21,037 validated human genes to their biological function.[2]

Gojobori has worked extensively on the rates of synonymous and non-synonymous substitutions, positive selection, horizontal gene transfer, viral evolution, genome evolution, and comparative gene expression. In recent years, he has focused on the evolution of the brain and central nervous system,[3][4][5][6][7] and COVID-19 or virus transmissions.

Gojobori has served as the Program Director of the Council for Science and Technology Policy (CSTP) of the Government of Japan and is the Science Officer of the Ministry of Education, Science, Sports, Culture, and Technology (MEXT). He has contributed to databases such as DDBJ/GenBank/EMBL and the H-Invitational human gene database.[8]

He has had more than 400 publications in peer-reviewed international journals on comparative and evolutionary genomics.[8] Gojobori has also contributed to the GenBank database construction as well as the H-Invitational human gene database.

Honors

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Prof. Gojobori is a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2006) and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) (2005).[9] In 2006 Pope Benedict XVI appointed Prof. Gojobori as a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.[10] He has received the Gaetano Salvatore Gold Medal from Italy (2004). He was awarded the Kihara Memorial Foundation Academic Award in 1995 and the Purple Ribbon Medal and the Medal of Honor of Japan in 2009[11] for a series of his researches to pioneer the early age of “Molecular Evolutionary Studies using Genome Information”. In 2022, he was elected as a Fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology.[12]

References

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  1. ^ a b "Takashi Gojobori". KAUST Research Portal. Retrieved February 11, 2023.
  2. ^ Carrington, Damian; Cohen, Philip (April 20, 2004). "Bumper compendium of human genes released". New Scientist. Retrieved May 28, 2019.
  3. ^ Gaudet, P.; et al. (2011). "Towards BioDBcore: A community-defined information specification for biological databases". Database. 2011: baq027. doi:10.1093/database/baq027. PMC 3017395. PMID 21205783.
  4. ^ Nei, M.; Gojobori, T. (1986). "Simple methods for estimating the numbers of synonymous and nonsynonymous nucleotide substitutions". Molecular Biology and Evolution. 3 (5): 418–26. doi:10.1093/oxfordjournals.molbev.a040410. PMID 3444411.
  5. ^ Carninci, P.; et al. (2005). "The transcriptional landscape of the mammalian genome". Science. 309 (5740): 1559–63. Bibcode:2005Sci...309.1559F. doi:10.1126/science.1112014. PMID 16141072. S2CID 8712839.
  6. ^ Mammalian Gene Collection Program Team; et al. (2002). "Generation and initial analysis of more than 15,000 full-length human and mouse cDNA sequences". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 99 (26): 16899–16903. Bibcode:2002PNAS...9916899M. doi:10.1073/pnas.242603899. PMC 139241. PMID 12477932.
  7. ^ Okazaki, Y.; et al. (2002). "Analysis of the mouse transcriptome based on functional annotation of 60,770 full-length cDNAs". Nature. 420 (6915): 563–573. Bibcode:2002Natur.420..563O. doi:10.1038/nature01266. hdl:10161/11223. PMID 12466851.
  8. ^ a b "Gojobori, Takashi". TWAS. Retrieved August 18, 2021.
  9. ^ "2005 AAAS Fellows" (PDF). Retrieved May 28, 2019.
  10. ^ "Benedict XVI". Pontifical Academy of Sciences. Retrieved May 28, 2019.
  11. ^ "Prof. Takashi Gojobori was selected to receive the 2009 Autumn Purple Ribbon Medal". National Institute of Genetics. November 5, 2009. Retrieved May 28, 2019.
  12. ^ "April 28, 2022: ISCB Congratulates and Introduces the 2022 Class of Fellows!". www.iscb.org. Retrieved June 17, 2022.
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