All living organisms need the ability to maintain certain optimal intracellular states against diverse environmental changes, called “homeostasis”. For this purpose, microbes which are directly exposed to a host of environmental changes employ a variety of regulatory mechanisms and networks. We are particularly interested in revealing how microbes respond to environmental changes, especially toward oxidative stresses caused by metabolic changes, various chemical drugs, and metals, etc.
Theme 1. Growth and Differentiation of antibiotics-producing Streptomyces spp.; interplay with redox and stress regulation
● Role of alternative sigma factors and anti-sigma factors
● Regulators of anti-oxidative systems
● Response to redox-active drugs
● Response to transition metals
Theme 2. Mitochondrial function and oxidative stress response in fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe
● Regulation of Iron homeostasis and iron-sulfur cofactor metabolism
● Genomic study of genes encoding mitochondrial functions
● Regulation of long-term survival and stress response
Theme 3. Systems biology of bacterial response to oxidative and metal stresses
● Transcriptome analysis using direct RNA sequencing
● Regulons and Stimulons