How our species, Homo sapiens, emerged? To address this question, We take two approaches . One is “to understand the evolution of human specific traits ”. The other is “to understand the demographic history of human after they appeared in Africa”. We study Molecular Evolution and Population Genetics to understand these processes of human evolution at DNA level.
PublicationsIt is known that unusual length of this repeat causes genetic diseases, which affect central nervous systems and skeletogenesis. These kinds of diseases related to human specific traits such as large brain size or bipedal locomotion. I expect that the evolution of homopolymeric amino acid repeats can be a key to understand human evolution.
There are many projects aim to find markers or genes that are responsible for human genetic disease. As a consequence of these projects, massive amount of human SNP data or human genetic variation data are produced. We apply these medical data to human evolutionary study and try to connect medical and evolutional researches
Ancient DNA studies have revolutionized our understanding of population history by providing insights into the genetic makeup of ancient populations and their relationships to modern populations. We are studying ancient human DNAs from Japan and peopling of East Asians. We are also studying the process of introduction of pigs into Japan using ancient DNA.
Our interest is not only limited to human evolution. We have studied vertebrates including canids, fishes and echinoderms. The study of pigs are going on.
Application for graduate students or postdocs are welcome! Let’s learn and work on various knowledge and techniques for research, from whole genome sequencing to probability- and statistic-based evolutionary theory and to handling genome data on computers.
(*) indicates the corresponding author(s)
Kamiyamaguchi 1560-35, Hayama, Kanagawa 240-0193, Japan
gojobori_jun[at]soken.ac.jp