Kuratani Shin-gakujyutsu Project

Our group participate in KAKENHI Shin-gakujyutsu Project “Constraind & Directional Evolution” headed by Prof Kuratani of RIKEN as Omics Support Team.

Living organisms do not evolve perfectly in random directions, but we recognize unevenness and directionalities in phenotypic variations and evolutionary changes. Thus far, however, these directionality or evolutionary constraints have never been dealt with scientifically. In this project, we aim at detecting them at various hierarchical levels, to understand the relationships or correlations between phenotypic changes observed in a short time scale (like adaptive responses) and those observed in a longer scale as evolution, to look for mechanistic and causal logics linking between the two, and finally to establish a theoretical framework to deal with the patterns of evolution, involving classical natural selection and neutral theories.

For the ambitious goal above, large-scale omics analyses are key technologies, which includes super multiplex transcriptome analysis and de novo genome assembly of non-model organisms. Our Omics Support Team is respoinsible for the developent and the implementation of these technologies to support other groups’ omics studies and also share our expertise with the group members. For example, we have established a pipeline to process a large number (>100) of RNAseq libraries. We are also introducing stete-of-the-art technologies such as Nanopore long read seqeuncning, single-cell RNAseq and spacial transcriptome analysis.