Takashi Higurashi

Email: thigurashi@biochem.wisc.edu

Takashi Higurashi received his B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Engineering from Tottori University in Tottori, Japan, under the mentorship of Prof. Yasushi Kawata. He studied the mechanism of protein folding, oligomerization, and misfolding of oligomeric protein, GroES, in the context of physical chemistry and biotechnology. After obtaining his Ph.D. degree, he moved to Prof. Yuji Goto lab at Osaka University (Osaka, Japan) as a postdoctoral fellow to investigate a mechanism of amyloid fibril formation and protein folding in the light of physical chemistry and biophysics. He studied initially on amyloid fibril formation process of beta2-microglobulin, lately on direct observation of single molecule protein folding using X-ray under the co-mentorship of Dr. Yuji C. Sasaki at SPring-8/JASRI (Hyogo, Japan). In the course of his research in a biophysics field, he got a strong interest in in vivo protein folding and quality control of proteins: How proteins are maintained in the cell? So he decided to move into a cellular biology field. His current project is to elucidate the molecular mechanism on yeast prion maintenance by molecular chaperons in yeast. He focuses mainly on functions of Hsp70 system for maintenance of Rnq1, yeast prion protein of yeast prion phenotype [PIN+]/[RNQ+].