Laboratory of Biochemistry
Professor: Kouji Hirota
Associate Professor: Masato Taoka
Assistant Professor: Takuya Abe
 Recent advances in biotechnologies have successfully accumulated a series of the “genome” information, which have been collectively known as the blueprints of living organisms.  According to the information, for example, the human genome consists of 30-billion pairs of nucleotide that encode 26,800 genes/proteins, which are necessary for human beings during their lifetime; however, how these proteins function in the activities of the human lives is largely unknown.  The systematic identification and characterization of proteins and “proteome”, a coined word to describe a set of proteins encoded by genome, is called “proteomics” and it is now becoming one of the major interdisciplinary research areas of life science in “post-genomic era”.  The advent of proteomics and the other new scientific fields of “omics” force us to change the ways of understanding living things and of approaching their unsolved biological problems.  Proteomics is particularly a rich source of biological information because proteins are involved in almost all biological activities and are various in their properties, therefore we believe it can contribute greatly to our understanding of biological systems.  In this laboratory we are developing advanced technologies for proteomics, mainly based on liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry.  In particular, our recent studies focus on the development of the mass spectrometry-based analytical platform for “ribonucleoproteomics”, a new “omics” research field to study the functional networks of RNAs and proteins, and its application to biology.  The final goal of our study is to understand the mechanism of life with "words of molecules"..
Click here for Laboratory Home Page