For students
As a cross-appointment professor, I have been given this precious opportunity to run a laboratory at The Institute for Genetic Medicine at The Hokkaido University. I am thrilled to guide, mentor, and work with many students at the Hokkaido University. Here, I would like to send this message to students as my self-introduction.
I studied electronics, programming, statistics, etc. when I was young between 15 and 20 years old. That was about 30 years ago. After that period, I was serious about greening deserts, transferred to a university where I could learn about plants, and worked on research projects to obtain salt-tolerant plants. In this study, I challenged to obtain a high salt-tolerant plant by employing spontaneous mutations caused by the liquid culture of plant cells. Afterward, I joined Professor Ohtsubo’s laboratory at the University of Tokyo to learn more about plants. This laboratory was famous in Japan and abroad for research on mobile genetic elements, so-called transposons. Dr. Eiichi Ohtsubo and his wife, Dr. Hisako Ohtsubo, had jointly operated the laboratory where transposons in Escherichia coli (bacterium) and plants were studied. Incidentally, transposons are involved in genomic plasticity. I isolated a new group of transposons from plants in this laboratory and found that transposition of those transposons was repressed by an epigenetic mechanism called DNA methylation.
After completed Ph.D. at the University of Tokyo, I worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York and as a staff scientist at the National Institutes of Health (National Cancer Institute) in Maryland to study epigenetics. During that time, I focused on epigenetic mechanisms in fission yeast, more specifically heterochromatin formation via histone modifications. Once heterochromatin is formed, transcription of genes within heterochromatin domains is repressed. One of our research articles was awarded the Newcomb Cleveland Prize (Best paper of the year in Science Magazine). During this study, we found that there were DNA elements called boundaries that restrict the heterochromatin structure within domains and that those boundaries are located at the nuclear envelope. In other words, it became clear that a specific 3D genome structure (i.e., 3D Genome Organization) is involved in the formation of chromatin domains and the regulation of gene expression.
As I approached becoming an independent faculty, the 3D genomic result mentioned above was obtained, and I realized that the 3D Genome Organization field has many unanswered questions. Therefore, I decided to work on 3D genome projects once I was able to run my own laboratory at the Wistar Institute. That was back in 2007. At that time, there were no 3D genomic methods currently in use, and it was far from elucidating the 3D structure of the whole genome. Under such circumstances, our effort on developing a 3D genomic method was supported by the NIH Director's New Innovator Award, and we proposed a three-dimensional structural model of the fission yeast genome using our genomic method in 2010. In this research project, my education in engineering and programming, which was introduced at the very beginning of this page, was crucial. It comes to my understanding that working or studying hard will never be wasted.
Here I have traced a series of transitions in my research projects over the years because I wanted to explain the importance of commitment to any given research themes. It is really important to believe that the subject you are studying is something significant and to continue working hard to further elucidate fascinating phenomena hidden behind your results. My opinion is that biological research is an academic field where scientists work on much too complicated research targets (i.e., living organisms) so that it would be hard to make a difference between those who are very bright and those who are not. In other words, the more hits you make, the more likely you will get the right answer. At least, that is what I have believed in and what kept me progressing in my research.
This is slightly off-topic, but I think that basic research will probably become more important by explaining phenomena that are conserved in a wide variety of species. Medical research, on the other hand, aims to cure human diseases. These two academic fields seem to be completely incompatible with each other due to their philosophical backgrounds, although it is really useful to maintain the diversity of basic research for enriching future medical research. In my laboratory, while conducting basic research on the genome structure using fission yeast, we are also studying human cellular senescence (an important anti-cancer mechanism), which relatively leans toward translational research. There is a Japanese proverb that is “if you run after two hares you will catch neither.” I want to make sure that it will not happen to us. I hope that we are still chasing one rabbit under the umbrella of the 3D Genome Organization. In other ways, I would like to have my research themes be more in a “two birds with one stone” situation.
Lastly, I am very fortunate to run two laboratories at the Institute for Genetic Medicine at the Hokkaido University in Japan and at the Institute of Molecular Biology at the University of Oregon in the United States. During the period of work at the Hokkaido University, of course, the laboratory will be operated as usual. While working at the University of Oregon, I will guide students via teleconferences. Nowadays, teleconferencing technologies have improved to the extent that they are highly reliable. Therefore, no matter where I am, I can discuss research projects with students and laboratory staff without having any problems. Besides, Dr. Shinya Ohta (Associate Professor in the lab) and I always keep in touch and respond to students. Furthermore, if students in my lab have the interest to study abroad, I would consider offering an opportunity for the students in my laboratory located at the University of Oregon.
Please refer to Introduction.
Please refer to the Research for the specific research projects.
Laboratory visits are more than welcome. If you are interested in our research, please feel free to contact me at the email address below.
Institute for Genetic Medicine, Division of Genome Biology
Kenichi Noma (Email: noma@igm.hokudai.ac.jp)