Disclaimer: machine translated by DeepL which may contain errors.
Naoki Konno, Department of Biological Sciences, Receives JSPS Ikushi Prize
Wataru Iwasaki (Professor, Graduate School of Frontier Sciences / Department of Biological Sciences)
Naoki Konno
The Earth is home to a great diversity of living organisms, which together form an ecosystem that fundamentally sustains our existence. To understand how this diversity of life originated and how it will develop in the future, it is important to understand the rules behind its evolution. Against this background, Dr. Naoki Konno (second-year PhD student) has achieved outstanding research results in the field of bioinformatics, where he has elucidated the rules of life evolution based on large-scale data. In particular, it has been considered difficult to predict evolution at the level of living systems that occur on a long-term time scale, but Dr. Konno has developed Evodictor, a machine learning method that learns patterns of past evolutionary processes and predicts future evolution. He discovered that evolution can be predicted by analyzing the evolution of the metabolic systems of thousands of species of bacteria. This is an important achievement not only within the framework of basic biology, but also for future applications, such as predicting future species that are likely to acquire drug resistance genes in the medical field and predicting species that can introduce specific genes in the field of biotechnology.
The award was given to Dr. Konno for his achievements, including these research results, under the theme of "Bioinformatics for Elucidation of Past Evolution and Prediction of Future Evolution. We sincerely wish Dr. Konno continued success in his future endeavors.
The Rigaku-bu News, March 2024