is a Japanese molecular biologist, Vice-Director of the

National Institute of Genetics The National Institute of Genetics ("Japanese Institute of Genetics") is a Japanese institution founded in 1949. It hosts the DNA Data Bank of Japan The DNA Data Bank of Japan (DDBJ) is a biological database that collects DNA sequences. It i ...

(NIG) and the

DNA Data Bank of Japan The DNA Data Bank of Japan (DDBJ) is a biological database that collects DNA sequences. It is located at the National Institute of Genetics (NIG) in the Shizuoka prefecture of Japan. It is also a member of the International Nucleotide Sequence Da ...

(DDBJ) at NIG, in

Mishima Mishima may refer to: Places * Mishima, Fukushima, a town in Fukushima Prefecture * Mishima, Kagoshima, a village in Kagoshima Prefecture * Mishima, Niigata, a town in Niigata Prefecture * Mishima, Shizuoka, a city in Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan ...

, Japan. Gojobori is a Distinguished Professor at

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST; ar, جامعة الملك عبد الله للعلوم و التقنية ') is a private research university located in Thuwal, Saudi Arabia. Founded in 2009, the university provid ...

(KAUST) in Thuwal,

Saudi Arabia Saudi Arabia, officially the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), is a country in Western Asia. It covers the bulk of the Arabian Peninsula, and has a land area of about , making it the fifth-largest country in Asia, the second-largest in the A ...

. He is a Professor of Bioscience and Acting Director at the Computational Bioscience Research Center at KAUST. He has also been co-appointed as the Special Research Consultant of the

National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology The , or AIST, is a Japanese research facility headquartered in Tokyo, and most of the workforce is located in Tsukuba Science City, Ibaraki, and in several cities throughout Japan. The institute is managed to integrate scientific and engineeri ...

(AIST), and acts as a visiting professor of Keio University,

University of Tokyo , abbreviated as or UTokyo, is a public research university located in Bunkyō, Tokyo, Japan. Established in 1877, the university was the first Imperial University and is currently a Top Type university of the Top Global University Project b ...

, and

Tokyo Institute of Technology is a national research university located in Greater Tokyo Area, Japan. Tokyo Tech is the largest institution for higher education in Japan dedicated to science and technology, one of first five Designated National University and selected as ...

. He is an Associate Member of the

European Molecular Biology Organization The European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) is a professional, non-profit organization of more than 1,800 life scientists. Its goal is to promote research in life science and enable international exchange between scientists. It co-funds cour ...

(EMBO), a Member of Academia Europea and an Academician Member of the

Pontifical Academy of Sciences The Pontifical Academy of Sciences ( it, Pontificia accademia delle scienze, la, Pontificia Academia Scientiarum) is a Academy of sciences, scientific academy of the Vatican City, established in 1936 by Pope Pius XI. Its aim is to promote the ...

, Vatican.

Education

Gojobori finished his Ph.D. in Theoretical Population Genetics (1979) at

Kyushu University , abbreviated to , is a Japanese national university located in Fukuoka, on the island of Kyushu. It was the 4th Imperial University in Japan, ranked as 4th in 2020 Times Higher Education Japan University Rankings, one of the top 10 Design ...

, Japan. He was a research associate and research assistant professor at the

University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) is a public academic health science center in Houston, Texas, United States. It was created in 1972 by The University of Texas System Board of Regents. It is located in the T ...

(UTHealth) for 4 years (1979–1983). He was also visiting assistant professor at

Washington University in St. Louis Washington University in St. Louis (WashU or WUSTL) is a private research university with its main campus in St. Louis County, and Clayton, Missouri. Founded in 1853, the university is named after George Washington. Washington University is r ...

(1985, 1986) and visiting research fellow at the

Imperial Cancer Research Fund Cancer Research UK (CRUK) is the world's largest independent cancer research organization. It is registered as a charity in the United Kingdom and Isle of Man, and was formed on 4 February 2002 by the merger of The Cancer Research Campaign and t ...

(ICRF) in London (1989).

Research

He is the Founding Editor of the journal ''Genome Biology and Evolution'', the Executive Editor of the journal ''

Gene In biology, the word gene (from , ; "... Wilhelm Johannsen coined the word gene to describe the Mendelian units of heredity..." meaning ''generation'' or ''birth'' or ''gender'') can have several different meanings. The Mendelian gene is a b ...

'', Academic Editor of ''

FEBS Letters ''FEBS Letters'' is a not-for-profit peer-reviewed scientific journal published on behalf of the Federation of European Biochemical Societies (FEBS) by Wiley. It covers all aspects of molecular biosciences, including molecular biology and bioch ...

'', Associate Editor of ''

Molecular Biology and Evolution ''Molecular Biology and Evolution'' is a monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution. It publishes work in the intersection of molecular biology and evo ...

'' and ''

PLOS Genetics ''PLOS Genetics'' is a peer-reviewed open access scientific journal established in 2005 and published by the Public Library of Science. The founding editor-in-chief was Wayne N. Frankel (Columbia University Medical Center). The current editors-in ...

'', and Section Editor of Computer Genomics in '' BMC Genomics''. He has served on the editorial boards of 6 international journals including

GigaScience ''GigaScience'' is a peer-reviewed scientific journal that was established in 2012. It covers research and large data-sets that result from work in the biomedical and life sciences. The editor-in-chief is Scott Edmunds. Originally, the journal was ...

. Previously he was the Editor of ''

Journal of Molecular Evolution The ''Journal of Molecular Evolution'' is a monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal that covers molecular evolution. It is published by Springer Science+Business Media and was established in 1971. The founding editor was Emile Zuckerkandl, who re ...

'' for 8 years (1995–2003). He is leader of the Japanese team of the

H-Invitational the H-Invitational Database (H-InvDB) is a comprehensive annotation resource for human gene In biology, the word gene (from , ; "... Wilhelm Johannsen coined the word gene to describe the Mendelian units of heredity..." meaning ''generation' ...

international consortium who was tasked with creating a database linking the 21,037 validated human genes to their biological function. Gojobori has worked extensively on the rates of synonymous and non- synonymous substitutions, positive selection,

horizontal gene transfer Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) or lateral gene transfer (LGT) is the movement of genetic material between unicellular and/or multicellular organisms other than by the ("vertical") transmission of DNA from parent to offspring (reproduction). H ...

viral evolution Viral evolution is a subfield of evolutionary biology and virology that is specifically concerned with the evolution of viruses. Viruses have short generation times, and many—in particular RNA viruses—have relatively high mutation rates (on the ...

genome evolution Genome evolution is the process by which a genome changes in structure (sequence) or size over time. The study of genome evolution involves multiple fields such as structural analysis of the genome, the study of genomic parasites, gene and ancient ...

, and comparative gene expression. In recent years, he has focused on the evolution of the brain and

central nervous system The central nervous system (CNS) is the part of the nervous system consisting primarily of the brain and spinal cord. The CNS is so named because the brain integrates the received information and coordinates and influences the activity of all p ...

, and

COVID-19 Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a contagious disease caused by a virus, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The first known case was identified in Wuhan, China, in December 2019. The disease quickly ...

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

human gene database. He has had more than 400 publications in peer-reviewed international journals on comparative and evolutionary genomics. Gojobori has also contributed to the

GenBank The GenBank sequence database is an open access, annotated collection of all publicly available nucleotide sequences and their protein translations. It is produced and maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI; a part ...

database construction as well as the H-Invitational human gene database.

Honors

Prof. Gojobori is a Foreign Honorary Member of the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, a ...

(2006) and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) (2005). In 2006

Pope Benedict XVI Pope Benedict XVI ( la, Benedictus XVI; it, Benedetto XVI; german: link=no, Benedikt XVI.; born Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger, , on 16 April 1927) is a retired prelate of the Catholic church who served as the head of the Church and the soverei ...

appointed Prof. Gojobori as a member of the

. 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 Purple is any of a variety of colors with hue between red and blue. In the RGB color model used in computer and television screens, purples are produced by mixing red and blue light. In the RYB color model historically used by painters, pur ...

and the Medal of Honor of Japan in 2009 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 A fellow is a concept whose exact meaning depends on context. In learned or professional societies, it refers to a privileged member who is specially elected in recognition of their work and achievements. Within the context of higher education ...

of the

International Society for Computational Biology The International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) is a scholarly society for researchers in computational biology and bioinformatics. The society was founded in 1997 to provide a stable financial home for the Intelligent Systems for Mole ...

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Gojobori, Takashi 1951 births Living people Japanese molecular biologists Japanese geneticists Members of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Recipients of the Medal of Honor (Japan) People from Fukuoka Academic staff of Tokyo Institute of Technology Academic staff of Keio University Washington University in St. Louis faculty University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston faculty Kyushu University alumni Riken personnel