Position:
Post-Doctoral Fellow (2017-present)
morito.sakuma[at]msl.ubc.ca
Link: ResearchGate
Education:
2017 Ph.D., Department of Physics, Graduate School of Science, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan
2014 M.S., Department of Physics, Graduate School of Science, Tokyo University of Science, Tokyo, Japan
2012 B.S., Department of Applied Physics, Faculty of Science,Tokyo University of Science, Tokyo, Japan
Background and Research interests:
I have researched various fields such as surface science, tissue engineering, optical microscopy, single-molecule biology, and microfluidics. By combining these technologies, I aim to construct a high-precision measurement system and analyze/found protein functions at a level that no one has reached before. I am currently focusing on the “individuality” of enzyme populations and elucidate how individuality arises, affecting enzyme function. It has become clear that proteins have distinct activity states even in a clonal population. Since the individuality in enzyme molecule is maintained up to the physiological time scale, this would affect higher hierarchy levels, such as the cellular level. Therefore, my goal is to unravel more advanced biological phenomena from the single-molecule level. As an engineering side, my skills are useful in building systems for discovering new enzymes. My other goal is to find new enzymes and play them out thoroughly.
Publications:
・Quantitative Detection of Cell Activity by Measuring the Fluctuation of Intracellular Motility, Morito Sakuma, Yuichi Kondo, Hideo Higuchi, bioRxiv, https://doi.org/10.1101/850602, 2019
・Quantitative evaluation of malignant gliomas damage induced by photo activation of IR700 dye, Morito Sakuma, Sayaka Kita, Hideo Higuchi, Science and Technology of Advanced Materials, 2016, 17(1), 473-482
・Preparation of Thermoresponsive Nanostructured Surfaces for Tissue Engineering, Morito Sakuma, Yoshikazu Kumashiro, Masamichi Nakayam, Nobuyuki Tanaka, Yuji Haraguchi, Kazuo Umemura, Tatsuya Shimizu, Masayuki Yamato, Teruo Okano, Journal of Visualized Experiments, 2016, 109, e53465
・Control of Cell Adhesion and Detachment on Temperature-Responsive Block Copolymer Langmuir Films, Morito Sakuma, Yoshikazu Kumashiro, Masamichi Nakayama, Nobuyuki Tanaka, Kazuo Umemura, Masayuki Yamato, Teruo Okano, 2013 MRS Fall Meeting Proceedings, 2014, 1621
・Thermo-Responsive Nanostructured Surfaces Generated by the Langmuir-Schaefer Method are Suitable for Cell Sheet Fabrication, Morito Sakuma, Yoshikazu Kumashiro, Masamichi Nakayama, Nobuyuki Tanaka, Kazuo Umemura, Masayuki Yamato, Teruo Okano, Biomacromolecules, 2014, 15(11), 4160-4167