DATE2021.12.16 #Awards & Prizes

Department of Biological Sciences alumnus Dr. Takafumi Kato wins the 38th Inoue Research Encouragement Award

Disclaimer: machine translated by DeepL which may contain errors.

Dr. Takafumi Kato

Dr. Takafumi Kato, a graduate of the Department of Biological Sciences, has received the 38th Inoue Research Encouragement Award.

Dr. Kato was a graduate student in our lab from 2015 to 2020, where he studied the vacuolar membrane-localized iron ion transporter VIT1, an important protein involved in plant iron ion homeostasis, which is used for crop modification. It has also attracted attention as a drug discovery target because of its role in host parasitism of pathogenic protozoa such as malaria. However, VIT1 does not show homology to any transporter, and its three-dimensional structure and detailed molecular mechanism have long been unknown. Dr. Kato determined the crystal structure of VIT1 by X-ray crystallography and clarified the detailed transport mechanism by functional analysis using artificial lipid vesicles. Dr. Kato was the first in the world to publish an atomic-level discussion of VIT1, and this research is important for a wide range of fields, including plant physiology, agriculture, and medicine.

Dr. Kato also began structural analysis using cryo-electron microscopy in 2019, and has already succeeded in determining the structures of several proteins. He is currently a research fellow at the University of Oxford, UK, where he is engaged in the structural analysis of proteins using electron microscopy. We congratulate Dr. Inoue on receiving this award and look forward to his continued success.

The 38th Inoue Research Encouragement Award
http://www.inoue-zaidan.or.jp/b-01.html?eid=00049

(Responsibility: Professor Osamu Nureki, Department of Biological Sciences)