In this era of high-throughput biology, bioinformatics has become a major discipline for making sense out of large-scale datasets. Bioinformatics is usually considered as a practical field developing databases and software tools for supporting other fields, rather than a fundamental scientific discipline for uncovering principles of biology. The KEGG resource that we have been developing is a reference knowledge base for biological interpretation of genome sequences and other high-throughput data. It is now one of the most utilized biological databases because of its practical values. For me personally, KEGG is a step toward understanding the origin and evolution of cellular organisms.
Keywords: KEGG; KEGG MEDICUS; KEGG module; pathway mapping; reaction module.
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