Shigeo Ohno

Shigeo Ohno (大野 茂男, Ōno Shigeo, born March 1952) is a Japanese molecular biologist known for his pioneer research on Protein Kinase C (PKC) and Cell Polarity. His works led to the fundamental understanding of cell polarity in response to cell signaling.

Contribution

After the pivotal discovery of PKC by Yasutomi Nishizuka, in the mid 1980s, Ohno and his colleagues found novel PKC isotypes (nPKC) and atypical PKC isotypes (aPKC).[1][2] These findings showed that PKC family plays various rules in cell signaling.[3]

On the other hand, the concept of cell polarity arises primarily through the localization of specific proteins to specific areas of the cell membrane. In 1988, Kenneth J. Kemphues and his colleagues identified par (partitioning defective) genes that are involved in cell-fate specification in Caenorhabditis elegans.[4] In the mid 1990s, Kemphues research group cloned Par1 and Par3 genes in C. elegans, showing PAR1 is enriched at the posterior periphery in the cell while PAR3 is found at the anterior periphery.

In 1998, Ohno's research group found that aPKC is essential for proper asymmetric cell divisions and co-localizes with PAR3 in C. elegans, indicating the relationship between intracellular signal transduction and cell polarity.[5] Also, they discovered aPKC-specific interacting protein, ASIP, which is a mammalian homologue of C. elegans PAR3.[6] These pioneer works led the significant finding of a conserved PAR3-PAR6-aPKC protein complex regulating cell polarity in response to cell signaling.[7][8]

Biography

Ohno was born in 1952 in Niigata Prefecture, Japan. He obtained his B.S. in 1975 and his Ph.D. in Biochemistry in 1980 from The University of Tokyo.[9] His supervisor, Kazutomo Imabori, led Yoshinori Ohsumi, the 2016 Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine, in the same lab.

From 1980 to 1983, Ohno served as a postdoctoral fellow at the Cancer Institute, Japanese Foundation for Cancer Research to investigate Interferons with Tadatsugu Taniguchi.[10][11][12] From 1983 to 1991, he was a research associate under Koichi Suzuki at Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Medical Science to investigate Calpain[13] and PKC.[1][2] He spent 3 months as a visiting scholar at Yale University in 1988 under Frank Ruddle.[9]

In 1991, Ohno became Professor and Chair of the Department of Molecular Biology at Yokohama City University School of Medicine,[9] and led several medical students and junior researchers, as well as actively advanced collaborative researches with physician scientists. His lab focused on cell signaling via PKC and the molecular mechanisms how cell polarity is related to other signaling pathways such as cell growth, apoptosis and carcinogenesis. Another project is the mechanism of the quality control of mRNA, a mechanism called nonsense-mediated mRNA decay.[9]

In 2017, after becoming Professor Emeritus, Ohno served as President of the Consortium of Biological Sciences (ConBio 2017) in Kobe, Japan, which was also the 26th international conference of the Federation of National Societies of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in the Asian and Oceanian Region (FAOBMB).[14]

Honors and awards

Editorial activities

Ohno served as an editor of The Journal of Biochemistry, which was founded in 1922 and publishes the results of original research in the fields of Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, Cell Biology, and Biotechnology.

References

  1. Ohno, S; Kawasaki, H; Imajoh, S; Suzuki, K; Inagaki, M; Yokokura, H; Sakoh, T; Hidaka, H (1987). "Tissue-specific expression of three distinct types of rabbit protein kinase C". Nature. 325 (7000): 161–6. doi:10.1038/325161a0. PMID 3808073.
  2. Ohno, S; Akita, Y; Konno, Y; Imajoh, S; Suzuki, K (1988). "A novel phorbol ester receptor/protein kinase, nPKC, distantly related to the protein kinase C family". Cell. 53 (5): 731–41. doi:10.1016/0092-8674(88)90091-8. PMID 3370672.
  3. Ohno, S; Nishizuka, Y (2002). "Protein kinase C isotypes and their specific functions: prologue". Journal of Biochemistry. 132 (4): 509–11. doi:10.1093/oxfordjournals.jbchem.a003249. PMID 12359062.
  4. Kemphues, KJ; Priess, JR; Morton, DG; Cheng, NS (1988). "Identification of genes required for cytoplasmic localization in early C. elegans embryos". Cell. 52 (3): 311–20. doi:10.1016/S0092-8674(88)80024-2. PMID 3345562.
  5. Tabuse, Y; Izumi, Y; Piano, F; Kemphues, KJ; Miwa, J; Ohno, S (1998). "Atypical protein kinase C cooperates with PAR-3 to establish embryonic polarity in Caenorhabditis elegans". Development. 125 (18): 3607–14. PMID 9716526.
  6. Izumi, Y; Hirose, T; Tamai, Y; Hirai, S; Nagashima, Y; Fujimoto, T; Tabuse, Y; Kemphues, KJ; Ohno, S (1998). "An atypical PKC directly associates and colocalizes at the epithelial tight junction with ASIP, a mammalian homologue of Caenorhabditis elegans polarity protein PAR-3". Journal of Cell Biology. 143 (1): 95–106. doi:10.1083/jcb.143.1.95. PMC 2132825. PMID 9763423.
  7. Ohno, S (2001). "Intercellular junctions and cellular polarity: the PAR-aPKC complex, a conserved core cassette playing fundamental roles in cell polarity". Current Opinion in Cell Biology. 13 (5): 641–8. doi:10.1016/S0955-0674(00)00264-7. PMID 11544035.
  8. Suzuki, A; Ohno, S (2006). "The PAR-aPKC system: lessons in polarity". Journal of Cell Science. 119 (Pt6): 979–87. doi:10.1242/jcs.02898. PMID 16525119.
  9. Shigeo Ohno, CDB Symposium 2009 Speaker
  10. Ohno, S; Taniguchi, T (1981). "Structure of a chromosomal gene for human interferon beta". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 78 (9): 5305–9. doi:10.1073/pnas.78.9.5305. PMC 348733. PMID 16593086.
  11. Ohno, S; Taniguchi, T (1982). "Inducer-responsive expression of the cloned human interferon beta 1 gene introduced into cultured mouse cells". Nucleic Acids Research. 10 (3): 967–77. doi:10.1093/nar/10.3.967. PMC 326214. PMID 6174942.
  12. Ohno, S; Taniguchi, T (1983). "The 5'-flanking sequence of human interferon-beta 1 gene is responsible for viral induction of transcription". Nucleic Acids Research. 11 (16): 5403–12. doi:10.1093/nar/11.16.5403. PMC 326286. PMID 6310498.
  13. Ohno, S; Emori, Y; Imajoh, S; Kawasaki, H; Kisaragi, M; Suzuki, K (1984). "Evolutionary origin of a calcium-dependent protease by fusion of genes for a thiol protease and a calcium-binding protein?". Nature. 312 (5994): 566–70. doi:10.1038/312566a0. PMID 6095110.
  14. General Information, ConBio 2017
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