Laboratory of Bioinformatics

1. Members

• Project Leader - Kenji Mizuguchi (Mail:kenji)
• Researcher - Shandar Ahmad
• Project Researcher - Chioko Nagao
• Postdoctoral Research Associates - Sukanta Mondal, Lokesh P.Tripathi, Mizuki Morita, Yoichi Murakami
• Graduate Students - Chen Yi-an, Samia Haseeb Khan
• Administrative Assistant - Masami Takine (Mail:masami)
• Research Assistant - Seika Murakami

(Mail:add@nibio.go.jp)
Website:http://www.mizuguchilab.org/

2. Objectives

We carry out structural and functional bioinformatics research into complex systems with the ultimate goal of developing novel drugs. Our work aims to extract new knowledge from large-scale experimental data, such as genome sequences and protein three-dimensional structures, particularly to aid target discovery. Our approaches include both algorithm development and analyses of individual biological systems.

3. Research

I. Methods development for the identification of new drug targets

1)Prediction of protein structure, function and interaction.
2)Integrated database for genes, proteins and chemical compounds.
3)Network-based prioritization of candidate genes/proteins.

II. Applications to specific systems

Analysis of experimental data in areas including neurological disorders, chronic inflammatory diseases, infectious diseases and membrane proteins.

4. Applications

Our database and software tools for homology detection have been commercialized and used widely to characterize drug targets and related proteins. Our current work can lead to similar tools and the identification of novel targets in several different disease areas.

References

1. Mizuguchi K. (2004) Fold recognition for drug discovery. Drug Discovery Today: Targets;3:18-23.
2. Camargo, L.M. et al. (2007). Disrupted in Schizophrenia 1 Interactome: evidence for the close connectivity of risk genes and a potential synaptic basis for schizophrenia. Mol Psychiatry 12, 74-86.
3. Andrabi M., Mizuguchi K., Sarai A. and Ahmad S. (2009). Prediction of mono- and di-nucleotide specific contacts in DNA-binding proteins using neural networks, BMC Structural Biology, 9:30.

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