The National Bioscience Database Center (NBDC) held the Symposium of Database Togo (Integration) online on October 5, 2020. A total of 315 researchers from universities, research institutes, and companies all over the nation participated in the event.

The symposium held two sessions of panel discussions on the theme of “10 years’ footprints and future of bioscience databases” and 55 poster presentations related to database construction, operation, and utilization as a result of the proposals we called for to a wide range of stakeholders of life science databases.

In the first panel discussion, we invited Dr. Jun Sese, President of Humanome Lab. Inc., who has supported the bioscience database program; as an external expert committee member, Dr. Kenji Mizuguchi, Professor of the National Institutes of Biomedical Innovation, Health and Nutrition, Earth-life Science Institute, Institute for Protein Research (IPR) of Osaka University; and Ken Kurokawa, Professor, National Institute of Genetics. They discussed their activities and the direction of bioscience databases.

The second panel discussion was held by outstanding young researchers Dr. Nozomu Yachie, Associate Professor, School of Biomedical Engineering, University of British Columbia; Dr. Atsushi Nagano, Associate Professor, Department of Plant Life Science, Faculty of Agriculture, Ryukoku University; and Wataru Aoki, Assistant Professor, Kyoto University Graduate School of Agriculture. They talked about the use of databases related to their own research and the development of databases for the future.

Dr. Takashi Ito, Research Supervisor, Database Integration Coordination Program by NBDC, and Professor, Department of Basic Medicine, Kyushu University, joined the discussions as a coordinator. Toshiyuki Shingo from NBDC attended as a facilitator.

In the poster presentation section, we prepared independent online rooms for each presenter. By posting the presentation posters on the symposium homepage and allowing participants to view the posters in advance, the presenters and participants had smooth discussions on the day of the symposium.

For more information about the Symposium of Database Togo (Integration) 2020, please refer to the following link:

https://biosciencedbc.jp/event/symposium/togo2020/