A grand challenge
in the genome science of the 21st century is to computationally
predict systemic functional behaviors of the cell, the
organism, and the ecosystem from genomic and molecular
information, especially for the purpose of medical, industrial,
and other practical applications. This will require new
bioinformatics, not simply for screening large-scale data,
but rather for reconstructing the system and computing
its interactions with the environment. While traditional
genomics and other types of omics approaches have contributed
to our understanding of the genomic space of possible genes
and proteins that make up the biological system, new chemical
genomics initiatives will give us a glimpse of the chemical
space of possible compounds and reactions that exist as
an interface between the biological system and the natural
environment.
The 21st Century Center of Excellence (COE) program entitled "Knowledge
Information Infrastructure for Genome Science" is a joint venture between
the Bioinformatics Center of the Institute for Chemical Research and the School
of Pharmaceutical Sciences in Kyoto University, with support from the Ministry
of Education, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan. The program aims at developing
bioinformatics technologies to reconstruct the biological system and its environment
by integrating our knowledge on the genomic space and the chemical space, which
will enable practical applications including drug discovery and personalized
medicine. In addition, a new education/training program is being introduced,
integrating traditional bioinformatics with physics and chemistry and with medical
and pharmaceutical sciences. The program also assists further developement of
the KEGG resource (
http://www.genome.jp/kegg/),
by extending its PATHWAY collection to include wiring diagrams of both endogenous
and exogenous molecules.