KANEHISA

The Genome Informatics Project was initiated in April 1991 as a part of the first five-year MESSC (Ministry of Education, Science, Sports and Culture) Human Genome Program headed by Kenichi Matsubara of Osaka University. The project was instrumental in establishing new research areas bridging biological science and computer science and developing new computational technologies for genome research. The result is the GenomeNet Database Service which has since been operated by the Supercomputer Laboratory (SCL) of Kyoto University, in collaboration with the Human Genome Center (HGC) of the University of Tokyo. Most of the standard molecular biology databases were made accessible through WWW, Gopher, e-mail, on-line guest accounts, and special client programs. In addition, new database systems that had been developed by HGC and a number of researchers in collaboration and unique databases organized by scientists in the Japanese research community were made available through the GenomeNet..