Welcome to Gojobori Lab

Research Center for Integrative Evolutionary Science/Integrative Evolutionary Science, SOKENDAI

Our research topics

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.

Publications

Homopolymeric amino acid repeat

It 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.

Diseases

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

Ancient DNA studies have revolutionized our understanding of human population history by providing insights into the genetic makeup of ancient populations and their relationships to modern populations. We are studying ancient DNAs from Japan and peopling of East Asians.

Non-human species

Our interest is not only limited to human evolution. We have studied vertebrates including canids, fishes and echinoderms.

People

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.

Jun Gojobori

PI

Selected Publication List

(*) indicates the corresponding author(s)

  • Gojobori, J. et al. (2024) Japanese wolves are most closely related to dogs and share DNA with East Eurasian dogs. Nat. Commun. 15, 1680
  • Xiaokaiti X. ...Gojobori J* et al. (2023) The history of ancient Japanese dogs revealed by mitogenomes. Anthr. Sci. 230617 doi:10.1537/ase.230617.
  • Mizuno F, Gojobori J* et al. (2021) Population dynamics in the Japanese Archipelago since the Pleistocene revealed by the complete mitochondrial genome sequences. Scientific reports 11:12018-12018.
  • Gojobori J* (2020) Rare allele sharing in the East Asian. Archivio per l'Antropologia e la Etnologia 2020:53-754.
  • Nishiyama KV, Satta Y, Gojobori J* (2020) Do Genes Associated with Dyslexia of Chinese Characters Evolve Neutrally? Genes 11:658.
  • Gojobori J* et al. (2015) mtDNA diversity of the Zapotec in Mexico suggests a population decline long before the first contact with Europeans. J Hum Genet 60: 557-559.
  • Gojobori J* (2012) A commentary on the history of human populations in the Japanese Archipelago inferred from genome-wide SNP data with a special reference to the Ainu and the Ryukyuan populations. J Hum Genet 57, 753-754.
  • Yamamichi M, Gojobori J, Innan H*. (2012) An autosomal analysis gives no genetic evidence for complex speciation of humans and chimpanzees. Mol Biol Evol 29, 145-156.
  • Gojobori J and Ueda S*. (2011) Elevated evolutionary rate in genes with homopolymeric amino acid repeats constituting nondisordered structure. Mol Biol Evol 28:543-550.
  • Gojobori J and Innan H*. (2009) Potential of fish opsin gene duplications to evolve new adaptive functions. Trends Genet 25:198-202.
  • Gojobori J, Tang H, Akey JM, Wu CI*. (2007) Adaptive evolution in humans revealed by the negative correlation between the polymorphism and fixation phases of evolution. PNAS 104:3907-3912

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Contact

Our Address

Kamiyamaguchi 1560-35, Hayama, Kanagawa 240-0193, Japan

Email Us

gojobori_jun[at]soken.ac.jp