DATE2021.04.30 #Awards & Prizes

Emeritus Professor Hitoshi Banno receives the Order of the Sacred Treasure, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon.

Disclaimer: machine translated by DeepL which may contain errors.

Emeritus Professor Hitoshi Banno

Professor Hitoshi Banno, Emeritus Professor of Graduate School, received the Order of the Sacred Treasure, Gold Rays with Rosette in the Spring 2021 Medal of Honor.

Professor Banno has consistently conducted research on the mechanism of smell perception. When he joined the then Department of Chemistry, Graduate School of Science, the olfactory receptor family was identified by Richard Axel and Linda Buck (Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2004), but various important questions, such as how smells are encoded in the brain, remained unresolved. Dr. Buck took on this challenge, and in particular, worked to elucidate the "one glomerule, one receptor" rule, which describes how the axons of the approximately 10 million olfactory nerve cells locate a single projection on the glomerular map formed in the olfactory bulb, the apical region of the brain. As a result of a series of studies, he revealed that the projection location is determined through the selection of olfactory receptor genes, the amount of cAMP produced by the olfactory receptor molecules depending on their type, and the regulation of the transcription of axon guidance molecules, which is also determined by the receptor molecules. Dr. Sakano further addressed the question of how the brain reads the odor information in the glomerular map, which is a problem of emotional and behavioral judgment. In particular, he created genetically engineered mice lacking the dorsal region of the glomerular map and showed that these mice do not show any inborn fear response, indicating that instinctive and memory-based learning circuits are already operating independently via separate receptors at the information reception stage.

We extend our sincere congratulations to Dr. Kato on receiving this award in recognition of his many years of distinguished service in education and research that have clarified the whole picture of odor information processing, including these findings.

Cabinet Office Website
https://www8.cao.go.jp/shokun/hatsurei/r03haru.html#jokun

(Responsibility: Professor Yuichi Iino, Department of Biological Sciences)