The University of Osaka · Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology
Professor Yoshie Harada's research lab specializes in nanoscale biophysics and molecular recognition, focusing on understanding cellular heat transfer mechanisms and the dynamics of cytoskeletal proteins using advanced nanoscale imaging and sensing techniques. The lab develops and applies novel nanomaterials—such as fluorescent nanodiamonds and polyamide-based DNA binders—to probe intracellular thermal conductivity and sequence-specific DNA interactions with high spatial and temporal resolution. Their work bridges nanotechnology, cell biology, and biophysics to reveal fundamental mechanisms in cellular thermogenesis and gene regulation at the molecular level.
Figures are computed from collected data and may differ slightly.
Understanding heat dissipation processes at nanoscale during cellular thermogenesis is essential to clarify the relationships between the heat and biological processes in cells and organisms. A key parameter determining the heat flux inside a cell is the local thermal conductivity, a factor poorly investigated both experimentally and theoretically. Here, using a nanoheater/nanothermometer hybrid made of a polydopamine encapsulating a fluorescent nanodiamond, we measured the intracellular thermal
We used video-fluorescence microscopy to directly observe the sliding movement of single fluorescently labeled actin filaments along myosin fixed on a glass surface. Single actin filaments labeled with phalloidin-tetramethyl-rhodamine, which stabilizes the filament structure of actin, could be seen very clearly and continuously for at least 60 min in 02-free solution, and the sensitivity was high enough to see very short actin filaments less than 40 nm long that contained less than eight dye mol
N-Methylpyrrole (Py)-N-methylimidazole (Im) polyamides are small organic molecules that can recognize predetermined DNA sequences with high sequence specificity. As many eukaryotic promoter regions contain highly GC-rich sequences, it is valuable to synthesize and characterize Py-Im polyamides that recognize GC-rich motifs. In this study, we synthesized four hairpin Py-Im polyamides 1-4, which recognize 5'-GCGC-3' and investigated their binding behavior with surface plasmon resonance assay. Py-I
Open papers in the app to read, cite, and organize with AI.
