User:Umeno

From 2006.igem.org

Greeting!
I am Daisuke Umeno, who is the only one oficially supporting CHIBA Team (too bad for them!).
We are working hard to stay here-just to survive iGEM.

What is iGEM to me?

Stay back. This is my war....

As a Researcher ~Almost Lost in the Pacific

1998 Ph.D. in Chemistry, Mizuo Maeda lab. (Kyushu University, JPN).
~Grafting synthetic polymers on dsDNAs.
I developed the way to freely graft the synthetic polymers on dsDNA. Here DNA was just a part of material, rather than the genetic component. I think our work was one of the very first attempts to use long stretch of DNA as a scaffold for assembling or clustering molecular function. I showed that polymer jacketted DNAs are ligatable/recuttalbe with another piece of DNA. This means you can connect dsDNA modified with different polymers at you will- exactly as molecular biologist does. We claimed DNA is the best material for assembling or aligning polymer function in submicrometer scale. I also showed the transcription can be regulated by the dynamics of polymer grafted on DNA. Alas! this part of the project has been unpublished for 7 years now, but I earned a prize on it in the research competition held by Newspaper/ Media group (Fuji sankei Group). With the prize money, I bought Miata (Mazda). But Oops, I ruined it in 8 months.

1999-2003 PostDoc at Frances H. Arnold lab. (Caltech)
Directed evolution of biosynthetic pathways.
I was evolving carotenoid pathways toward novel and unique ones that never existed in Natural history. With cool students Alex Tobias and Adam Hartwick, we tested many theory on pathway evolution. Here I learned almost all about biology. Also I developed crystal clear vision on what kind of professor I would like to be. I met many special people such as Chris Voigt (UCSF, yes, that Chris) and Pat Cirino (Penn State).

2003-2005 Senior Fellow at Lawlence A. Loeb lab. (UW)
They developed a pretty cool mutator E. coli strain. I was trying to adjust their system for protein engineering. I was also involved in the glycosylase project between Loeb and Baker. Unlike the way I familiar with, they were computationally designing the new pocket of DNA repair enzyme to do new job. Because of my tranferring (and maybe lack of smartness), none of the job are completed yet. But they will be done.

April 2005 Became a faculty at Chiba (Associate Professor in Dept Applied Chemistry and Biotech.)
Our team is quite new, and we started lots of things in synthetic biology field. Keywords are E coli mutator (Loeb), phage mutator, switching (iGEM king), display techniques, DNA based-materials, and pathway enginerring. Oh, Be nice, don't say they are just the extent of what I have already done in my training days (how can I speak back to?).

As a Chiba MAN

My HOBBY
1. iGEM (of course it comes first!!)
2. Washing my digestion system with EtOH (365 days a year)
3. Car Drifting
4. Being taken care of by my family
5. Asking for money around
6. Taking nap in a train

More About Me:

[http://chem.tf.chiba-u.jp/~umeno/ My HP]
[http://graft.web.infoseek.co.jp/index2.html Ume Group HP]
[http://chem.tf.chiba-u.jp/igem/index.html iGEM CHIBA HP]

Mummering in JPNese:

This is a message boad to myself (mostly) and to japanese supporters (if any).
こんにちは　しばらくは日本語でもいいから　まずコンテンツつくりましょう。　趣味とかすきなサイトへのりんくとか