A paper by Professor Naruya Saitou, Division of Population Genetics, is on the feature article called “The Top 100 Papers” of nature magazine. His paper, “The neighbor-joining method-a new method for reconstructing phylogenetic trees” (Saitou and Nei, 1987), was based on his doctoral dissertation presented during his stay in the U.S.A., and was published on Molecular Biology and Evolution. Naruya Saitou’s paper is number 20 on the list, and the article says, “Physical anthropologist Naruya Saitou helped to devise the technique when he joined Masatoshi Nei’s lab at the University of Texas in Houston in the 1980’s to work on human evolution and molecular genetics, two fields that were starting to burst at the seams with information.” The Nature used Web of Science of Thomson Reuters, and introduced Top 100 of most numerous numbers of searches, within the papers published from 1900 to present.

http://www.nature.com/news/the-top-100-papers-1.16224

Division of Population Genetics • Saitou Group