Glycome Informatics: Methods and Applications

Kiyoko F. Aoki-Kinoshita simultaneously received her bachelor's and master'sdegrees of science in computer science from Northwestern University in 1996, after which she received her doctorate in computer engineering from Northwestern in 1999 under Dr. D. T. Lee. She was employed at BioDiscovery, Inc. in Los Angeles, California as a senior software engineer before moving to Kyoto, Japan, to work as a post-doctoral researcher at the Bioinformatics Center, Institute of Chemical Research, Kyoto University, under Drs. Hiroshi Mamitsuka and Minoru Kanehisa. There, she developed various algorithmic and data mining methods for analyzing the glycan structure data that were accumulated in the KEGG GLYCAN database. Since then, she has joined the faculty in the Department of Bioinformatics, Faculty of Engineering, Soka University, in Tokyo, Japan and is now an associate professor teaching bioinformatics. She is also involved in several research projects pertaining to the understanding of glycan function based on their structure as well as the recognition patterns of glycan structures by other proteins and even viruses. She has also begun developing a Web resource called RINGS (Resource for INformatics of Glycomes at Soka) that is still in its infancy, but is intended to freely provide many of the informatics algorithms and methods described in this book over the Web such that scientists may utilize them easily.