Joined department: 2003

Dr. Kihara's research interest is in the area of bioinformatics. In the last decade, a large amount of biological data, such as genome/protein sequences, protein 3D structures, and pathway data have become available. This data now enables us to employ comprehensive analysis of relationship between protein sequence, structure and function, interactions, evolution of protein families, pathways, and organisms. Especially, he is focusing on developing computational methods to predict and analyze protein structure/function, protein-protein docking, pathway structure, and their applications in genome-scale or pathway/network scale. He has worked recently on protein structure prediction, protein global/local shape comparison, development of prediction method of transmembrane proteins, and its application to genome sequences.