Molecular biology

Laboratory animal science

Neuroscience-general

Functional evolutionary genomics for the establishment of "stem cell anthropology"., 2017.04 - 2020.03

Summary： The human neocortex is responsible for higher-order brain functions and is the basis for high cognitive and language abilities unique to humans. On the other hand, the human central nervous system is fragile to damage and has poor repair potential. Recently, it has been reported that enhancers exhibit high tissue and interspecies specificity, and that their acquisition or deletion contributes significantly to the complexity and evolution of organisms. In this study, I focused on enhancers in neural stem cells and microglia with self-renewal capacity, and analyzed the functions of the identified enhancers.

Mechanisms of glial development, 2015.04 - 2018.03

Summary： We attempted to develop a system to visualize glial-restricted progenitors (GRPs) and/or transition state of neural stem cell (NSC) differentiation into glia. We identified Kcnj16 which is an inward-rectifier type potassium channel as a marker for GRPs or glial differentiation of NSCs via expression profiling to identify genes which respond to the temporal changes of gliogenic potency of NSCs during development and in situ hybridization analysis of expression pattern of candidate genes during central nervous system development. Finally, it has been suggested that a reporter system which can recapitulate the expression pattern of Kcnj16 can be applicable to visualize GRPs or glial differentiation of NSCs.