Dear Colleagues:

     Every year, about one hundred researchers and young students participate in a seminar and communicate with each other between presentations, with posters (about one hundred), for three days. At night, the participants enjoy conversations about scientific dreams until late at night in the wilderness under a wonderful starry sky.

     In the case of one of the extremely thermophilic model organisms, Thermus thermophilus HB8, the three-dimensional structures of 22 % of 2,200 proteins have already been determined. Furthermore, membrane and multi-subunit proteins have been subjected to three-dimensional structural analyses. In parallel with this, systems biological researches are now in progress by using about 1,000 proteins, which had been for structural analyses (http://www.thermus.org ; http://www.brc.riken.jp/lab/dna/en/thermus_en.html). Because functionally-unknown proteins are included in the intended system biological researches, genome-wide analyses (transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, imaging, etc.) have also been performed for predicting their functions. Their predicted functions are confirmed by recpective functional analyses.

     In this seminar, not only will the progress of Whole Cell Project be reported, but also seminars for researchers in different fields and students will be held as follows:
 1) Progress in model organism research
 2) Progress in systems biology research
 3) Methods for analysis of genome-wide mRNA (transcriptomics), protein expression (proteomics), metabolites (metabolomics),  and protein-protein interactions (interactomics)
 4) Use of imaging techniques in systems biology research.