Minoru Kanehisa (金久 實) (born January 23, 1948) is a Japanese bioinformatician. He is a project professor at Kyoto University, technical director of Pathway Solutions Inc and president of NPO Bioinformatics Japan.[1][2][3] He is one of Japan's most recognized and respected bioinformatics experts and is known for developing the KEGG bioinformatics database.[4]
In 1995, Kanehisa started the KEGG (Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes) database project.[8][9] Foreseeing the need for a computerized resource that can be used for biological interpretation of genome sequence data, he started developing the KEGG PATHWAY database. It is a collection of manually drawn KEGG pathway maps representing experimental knowledge on metabolism and various other functions of the cell and the organism. Each pathway map contains a network of molecular interactions and reactions and is designed to link genes in the genome to gene products (mostly proteins) in the pathway. This has enabled the analysis called KEGG pathway mapping, whereby the gene content in the genome is compared with the KEGG PATHWAY database to examine which pathways and associated functions are likely to be encoded in the genome.
