Unveiling microbial community dynamics

Faculty

Research Summary

In our laboratory, we are interested in understanding about microbial genome evolution and microbial community dynamics, and we are currently reaching out in the following two major research directions; I. Facilitate the development of an integrated database “MicrobeDB.jp”, II. Microbial community dynamics. Our research interests blend a background in microbial genomics and metagenomics with bioinformatics and integrated database developments that are just now allowing the prospect of illuminating microbial community dynamics. We are trying to gain a better understanding of how microbial diversity maintain as well as how it emerged.

Selected Publications

Higashi K, Suzuki S, Kurosawa S, Mori H, Kurokawa K. Latent environment allocation of microbial community data. PLoS Comput Biol. 2018 Jun 6;14(6):e1006143.

Mori H, Ishikawa H, Higashi K, Kato Y, Ebisuzaki T, Kurokawa K. PZLAST: an ultrafast amino acid sequence similarity search server against public metagenomes. Bioinformatics. 2021 Jul 7;37(21):3944–6.

Tsukuda N, Yahagi K, Hara T, Watanabe Y, Matsumoto H, Mori H, Higashi K, Tsuji H, Matsumoto S, Kurokawa K, Matsuki T. Key bacterial taxa and metabolic pathways affecting gut short-chain fatty acid profiles in early life. ISME J. 2021 Sep;15(9):2574-2590.

Nobu MK, Nakai R, Tamazawa S, Mori H, Toyoda A, Ijiri A, Suzuki S, Kurokawa K, Kamagata Y, Tamaki H. Unique H2-utilizing lithotrophy in serpentinite-hosted systems. ISME J. 2023 Jan;17(1):95-104.