Currently, with the rapid progress of experimental techniques and devices, behaviors of living organisms are available to be observed on a cell-by-cell, organism-by-organism, group-by-group basis. In addition, the last decade has witnessed a quantitative explosion of omics data, i.e. the conventional data on DNA, RNA, protein and low-molecular compound etc. at different cellular levels. There is an urgent need to utilize such big data to discover new insights and translate them in the wide range of biological fields including pharmaceutical medicine, food production, chemicals, energies and environmental safety all over the world. To stay ahead of the curve and stay competitive in this global trend, development of high-throughput technologies capable of swiftly producing accurate results and extracting usable knowledge from rapidly increasing biological data sets is highly needed.
In fields with great potential, such as pharmaceutical medicine and health care, Waseda University owns one of Japan’s largest technological storage of single-cell data analysis, which analyzes biological behaviors one by one, at a cellular level. In the field of metagenomics analysis, such as, the holistic study of intestinal flora, or the microecology of symbiotic bacteria of marine organisms (e.g. sponges), or the application of sequential microdissection technology to access close-up dissection data of internal organ tissues, CBBD-OIL is doing world-leading core research to produce a new type of biological information. Waseda also excels at high-throughput technology, like next-generation sequencing, and information analysis technology for predicting biological function, structure and interaction from RNA sequence. In contrast, AIST has the leading edge information analysis technologies to effectively identify genetic functions or disease-causing genomic mutations from massive genomic sequence data, by high-speed methods and accurate computing, and can, for example, detect postnatal abnormality of the epigenome with surgical precision. In addition to the systems biology approach, AIST is known for its numerous achievements, such as network modelling information analysis technology, which predict the interaction between genomes or proteins in a cell using numeric data (e.g. gene expression data), and is also known for its analysis on metabolism dynamics.
The National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) and Waseda University launched a new research base, "AIST-Waseda University Computational Bio Big Data Open Innovation Laboratory" (CBBD-OIL) at Nishiwaseda Campus. We combine Japan's leading biological systems’ big data storage at Waseda University with the information analysis technology seeds from both AIST and Waseda, and understand the mechanisms of biological phenomena as a system. We also strengthen the fundamental studies which lead to “bridging” for private enterprises to enter this field with our cutting-edge technology of biological information analysis, that is soon to become the global standard.