Our research interests are in illuminating the genetic information of diverse animals species including livestock species via various bioinformatics approaches. Major researches we are currently involved in include

1) evolutionary and population genetics studies of important livestock animals as well as microbial and viral species

2) construction of their genome assemblies with unprecedented quality

3) developing databases and useful bioinformatics tools to help decipher genetic information stored in them.

Our lab is the leading group of African cattle genome project to elucidate the history of cattle and discover important genes related to adaptive traits of various cattle breeds. We also conduct studies on native animal breeds of Korea such as Korean Long-tailed chicken and DongGyeongi through population genetics approaches. Moreover, as a part of international Vertebrate Genome Project, our lab collaborates with the world’s leading research institutes including Sanger Institute, Max-Planck Institute and Rockefeller University in assembling the genomes as well as performing comparative genomic analyses to decode their unique properties. Lastly but not least, we actively work on developing databases of microbial species and bioinformatics tools based on concepts of population genetics.