Shigeo Ohno

Shigeo Ohno received his B.S. in 1975, and his Ph.D. in 1980 from the University of Tokyo under the guidance of Dr. Kazutomo Imahori. He served as a postdoctoral fellow at Cancer Institute Tokyo from 1980 to 1983, where he worked on Transcription of Interferon gene with Dr. Tadatsugu Taniguchi before he moved to Rinshoken (Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Medical Science) to work on molecular cloning of calpain and PKC as a Research Scientist under the guidance of Dr. Koichi Suzuki. He spent 3 months at Yale University in 1988 under the guidance of Dr. Frank Ruddle. In 1991, he moved to Yokohama City University School of Medicine as a professor and started his own laboratory focused on Signal Transduction. In 1996, he found a protein termed ASIP, atypical PKC-specific interacting protein, mammalian homologue of C. elegans PAR-3. This led to the finding of a conserved PAR protein complex involved in a variety of biological contexts. The current interest of Dr. Ohno is the mechanism how cell polarity is related to other signaling pathways such as cell growth, apotosis and differentiation. Another project of his laboratory is the mechanism of the quality control of mRNA, a mechanism called nonsense-mediated mRNA decay.