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TAINAN, Taiwan

The Society of Genetics, Genomics and Computational Biology had officially set up an education center at National Cheng Kung University (NCKU), southern Taiwan, to facilitate genetics and computational biology studies and to promote international interaction and communication in these fields, the university announced Dec. 5.

Dr. Chi-Chuan Hwang, chair of the education center, said that in order to promote research in these areas, the society had set up different teams based on different job contents, including the biology database team, the non-biological resource team, the computational biology skills team, the genetics team, the biotechnology team and the talent development team, and assigned people from the society’s member countries to these teams.

“The education center established at NCKU is focusing on talent cultivation,” said Hwang, adding that the center hopes to recruit young students from different fields, including biology, medicine and engineering, in order to conduct interdisciplinary research.

With Fujitsu providing the hardware equipment, the first step taken by the education center was to ensure that the new software is capable of handling huge amount of data, and also to carry out the construction of gene pool and genome sequencing alignment, according to Hwang.

The “Genomics and Bioinformatics” course held on Dec. 3 was the first task of this education center.

Japan’s National Institute of Genetics (NIG) Deputy Director Takashi Gojobori, who is also Visiting Distinguished Chair Professor of NCKU, pointed out that efforts will be focused on the research of the variation of native species in Taiwan, especially the collection and analysis of seed gene pool, to build a complete gene sequencing database and also conduct a complete gene sequencing analysis on the collected genes.

Gojobori expected that these efforts would enhance NCKU’s research capability and academic standards related to non-model species and biological diversity.

He hoped that by gathering different research capability, every team member will be able to make the greatest possible contribution to the conservation and protection of agriculture, ocean and natural environment.

The center will serve as an important platform for international interaction and communication in these fields, according to Gojobori, whose main purpose is not only to develop and nurture talent for research, but also to recruit domestic and foreign scholars to conduct education training and organize idea exchange sessions between member countries.