Genome Evolution Laboratory

Kurokawa Group

Unveiling microbial community dynamics

Faculty

KUROKAWA, Ken
Professor

kk@nig.ac.jp

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HIGASHI, Koichi
Assistant Professor

khigashi@nig.ac.jp

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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.

Exploring microbial diversity in a continental serpentinite-hosted hydrothermal system.

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 Nov 5;37(21):3944-3946.
  • Kurokawa M, Higashi K, Yoshida K, Sato T, Maruyama S, Mori H, Kurokawa K. Metagenomic Thermometer. DNA Res. 2023 Dec 1;30(6):dsad024.
  • Warashina T, Sato A, Hinai H, Shaikhutdinov N, Shagimardanova E, Mori H,Tamaki S, Saito M, Sanada Y, Sasaki Y, Shimada K, Dotsuta Y, Kitagaki T, Maruyama S, Gusev O, Narumi I, Kurokawa K, Morita T, Ebisuzaki T, Nishimura A, Koma Y,Kanai A. Microbiome analysis of the restricted bacteria in radioactive elementcontaining water at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station. Appl Environ Microbiol. 2024 Apr 17;90(4):e0211323.