Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Okayama University

Research interests

Sense, such as vision, audition, touch sensation, gustation, and olfaction, is the sole window opening toward the outside of our bodies: it is an important function for living organisms to receive, transduce, integrate, recognize and process a wide array of information from the environment.

    In this research team, we focus on the first step of sensing through signal reception from environment to signal transduction and transfer in a cell. We aim to elucidate the molecular mechanisms of this process by knowing structures of the participating proteins. The pivot of our study is structural analyses of sensory receptors, signaling proteins, and regulatory proteins by X-ray crystallography. Many of our target proteins are eukaryotic membrane proteins, which are currently ones of the most difficult targets in the field of structural biology. In order to achieve structural analysis of these targets, we simultaneously carry out research and development of methods to facilitate sample preparation, a bottleneck for membrane protein crystallography. We also perform functional analyses of these proteins with biochemical and physiological approaches.

        The objective of this team is to understand the sensing mechanisms by integrating the structural and functional information.

Members

Atsuko Yamashita, Ph. D. (Professor)

    Phone & Fax: +81-86-251-7974

Norihisa Yasui, Ph. D. (Associate Professor)

    Phone: +81-86-251-7976

Naotaka Tsutsumi, Ph. D. (Assistant Professor)

    Phone: +81-86-251-7981

Nana Yoshikane (Technical staff)

Hikaru Ishida (Grad student, M2)

Mayu Kudo (Grad student, M2)

Tasuku Tamura (Grad student, M2)

Tomoya Mikan (Grad student, M2)

Yuta Suehiro (Grad student, M1)

Yushi Miyamoto (Grad student, M1)

Yuka Adachi (Undergraduate)

Aoshi Nakamura (Undergraduate)

Yusuke Nakamura (Undergraduate)

Sae Ootani (Undergraduate)

Nanami Kitamura (Undergraduate)

Yuri Kuhara (Undergraduate)

Mana Nagae (Undergraduate)

Rina Hashimoto (Undergraduate)

Yuka Hachiya (Undergraduate)

Contact address

Structural Biology Lab.

Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Okayama University

1-1-1, Tsushima-naka,

Kita-ku, Okayama 700-8530

Japan