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ResearchMap: http://researchmap.jp/jgojobor/
How our species, Homo sapiens, emerged? To address this question, I 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”. I study Molecular Evolution and Population Genetics to understand these processes of human evolution at DNA level. One of the current targets is tandem repeat of single amino acids, which is called as 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. And 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. I apply these medical data to human evolutionary study and try to connect medical and evolutional researches.
My interest is not only limited to human evolution but also includes evolution of primates, mammals and vertebrates.