太田朋子生于日本爱知县西加茂郡三好町,她的母亲很开明,让太田朋子从小就接受了非常良好的现代科学教育。1956年,她毕业于东京大学,之后去美国的北卡罗来纳州立大学的生物统计系获得了博士学位。1968年,太田朋子获得北卡罗来纳州立大学的博士学位后,返回日本,在木村資生的指导下参与和发展了中性演化理論。她提出近中性突变的的重要性,并由此发展了轻微突变的理论模型(slightly deleterious model)(Ohta, 1973)的「近中性演化理论(英语:Nearly neutral theory of molecular evolution)」(nearly neutral theory of evolution)。她的模型比木村資生的严格中性模型更具普适性。
Theoretical aspects of population genetics /Motoo Kimura and Tomoko Ohta (1971)
Evolution and variation of multigene families /Tomoko Ohta (1980)
Population genetics and molecular evolution : papers marking the sixtieth birthday of Motoo Kimura /edited by Tomoko Ohta and Kenichi Aoki (1985)
Tomoko Ohta and the Nearly Neutral Theories: The role of a female geneticist in the neutralist-selectionist controversy/Tomoko Y. Steen (1996) Ph.D. Dissertation. (CORNELL UNIVERSITY)
^The Name “United States of America”<xref ref-type="fn" rid="fn1">1</xref>. The American Historical Review. 1925-10. ISSN 1937-5239. doi:10.1086/ahr/31.1.79.
Profile of Tomoko Ohta at Perspectives on Molecular Evolution(页面存档备份,存于互联网档案馆)
Ohta, T. Slightly deleterious mutant substitutions in evolution. Nature. 1973, 246: 96–98. doi:10.1038/246096a0.
Ohta, T. and Gillespie, J.H. Development of Neutral and Nearly Neutral Theories. Theoretical Population Biology. 1996, 49: 128–142. doi:10.1006/tpbi.1996.0007.