The story takes place on the African continent, just below the equator, in a rural area with peaceful villages. One night, the villages suddenly stopped communicating with each other. The next morning, the neighbors, suspicious of what was going on, saw dead bodies lying in the silence. Strangely enough, there was nothing unusual about the buildings or the plants, only the animals. Global chemists from Japan and other countries took up the challenge of clarifying and preventing this strange phenomenon....

Microbial rhodopsin, a photoreceptor-type membrane protein that has recently been found in a wide range of microorganisms including bacteria, unicellular algae, fungi, and giant viruses, will be introduced, and its recent application to optogenetics will be discussed.

　With the development of next-generation sequencing technology, it has become possible to observe various events occurring on the genome on a genome-wide basis. Expectations are rising for "data-driven genome analysis," in which these large amounts of data are utilized to make completely new biological discoveries without using prerequisite knowledge. In this lecture, we will introduce the state-of-the-art approach of such data-driven genome analysis.