Dr. Katsuhiko Mineta is a senior research scientist in Computational Bioscience Research Center (CBRC) in King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) from 2014. He previously served as an associate professor of Information Science and Technology in Hokkaido University since 2003. He received his bachelor and MS degrees in agricultural chemistry from the University of Tokyo, Japan in 1997 and 1999, and his Ph.D. in genetics was received from the Graduated University for Advanced Studies, Japan in 2002. He worked as a postdoc in National Institute of Genetics, Japan and University of Chicago, USA. His researches are based on evolutionary biology and bioinformatics. He also interested in the environmental omics as a tool to understand the adapting process and mechanism of the organisms.
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Marine metagenomics is a powerful tool for studying the comprehensive structure of the microbial community in the sea. Since the structure of the microbial community could reflect the environmental diversity and dynamics, it is of particular interest to elucidate the diversity of the microbial community among different environments. To know these diversities, we have conducted the comparative marine metagenomics in the Red Sea near Saudi Arabia and the Pacific Ocean near Japan with time-series sampling approach. Because the Red Sea has very unique environmental features such as high salinity, high water temperature and low nutrition, the studies of comparative marine metagenomics between these different seas can give us significant insights into the understanding of how microbial communities can make environmental adaptation. In addition, the Red Sea can be a good model of the sea affected by global warming effects, thus the comparative study based on the Red Sea provides the essential insight into maintaining the sustainable ecosystem for human well-being. This approach also leads to reveal novel genes that are significantly useful for the industrial or pharmaceutical applications. In this presentation, we show an overview of our Red Sea metagenome project toward the comparative marine metagenomics. Note that the present study is conducted under the international collaboration of the members in CBRC at KAUST in Saudi Arabia with the Kitasato university group in Japan.