Laboratories

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Faculty and Staff

Research Topics

Water is the major constituent of our body and indispensable for many biological functions. In this laboratory, we investigate the physicochemical properties of water of muscle protein solutions to find a principle of chemo-mechanical energy conversion of protein motors. Recently we found the hyper-mobile water around actin filaments. It has not been observed in any other proteins than actin, and expected to be the key of muscle contraction mechanism. We are also trying to develop soft materials which can exhibit biomimetic functions such as motility, deformation, hardening/softening, sensing and so on, where water is again considered as the key to control such properties of polymer hydrogels.

Fig. 1 Apparatus of high resolution dielectric spectroscopy		Fig. 2 Proposed model of actomyosin motility