Collection and Investigation into Basic Evolutionary Information by Orrsite Collaboration

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In the term of the present grant from 2004 to 2007 we visited 67 universities and research institutes in 16 countries in total to fulfill our investigation purposes. Since we DDBJ organize the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration (INSDC) with GenBank in USA and EMBL Bank in Europe, our frequent visits to these two research organizations were crucial and fruitful, resulted in a steep increase in the number of published entries from 35 to 80 million sequences (or 40 to 82 billon bases) in the four years. The published entries include expressed sequences and the whole genome sequence with biological information for many species and thus indispensable for research in biology and related areas. We have also sewed specified databases such as GIB (bacterial genome database), GTOP (protein-structure prediction database) and CIBEX (gene expression database). These databases have been enriched in the contents and the number of users because of various international visits supported by the present grant.Some of the international visits have also contributed to carrying out data annotations of human genes, rice genes and mouse genes. The results of the annotations have been published in their respective databases and journals. For example, we have shown that the total number of genes in the human genome is about 35, 000 that is much larger than previously estimated.Recently, we participated in the international standardization of genome sequence data and published the guidelines for annotating genome sequences of eukaryotes, prokaryotes, viruses, plasmids and others.The outcomes of the international visits have been published in internationally well-known academic journals such as Nature, Nature Biotechnology, Nature Genetics, Science, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, Genome Research and Nucleic Acids Research (see the list of publications).