Research exchange with Cris: from fluorescence spectroscopy to human myocardium
- PDF / 287,899 Bytes
- 3 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 1 Downloads / 168 Views
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Research exchange with Cris: from fluorescence spectroscopy to human myocardium Shin’ichi Ishiwata 1 Received: 3 June 2020 / Accepted: 8 June 2020 # International Union for Pure and Applied Biophysics (IUPAB) and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
I do not remember exactly when I got to know Cris (Fig. 1). The first contact may have been around the time of the connectin/titin issue. Cris reported in his doctoral thesis (dos Remedios 1965; dos Remedios & Gilmour 1978) that in addition to actin (thin) and myosin (thick) filaments, a third filament exists in the sarcomeres of striated muscle. I may have come to know Cris through the interaction with the late Dr. Koscak Maruyama, a discoverer of connectin (cf. Maruyama 1997). What I remember clearly is that I spent about a month in the summer of 1987 at Cris’s laboratory within the University of Sydney. This was due to the establishment of an exchange program for faculty members between Waseda University and the University of Sydney. I think it was Cris who was aware of the agreement, and I think the invitation came from Cris. Anyway, as the first faculty member to exchange research using the agreement, I decided to go to Sydney. One of the reasons I decided to go was that I was interested in the spectroscopic method of measuring the distance between proteins using the fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) that was being advanced in Cris’s laboratory at that time. Using the method, I was interested in measuring the average distance between the heads of myosin molecules, especially when bound to actin filaments. Moreover, what made me want to go was because Masao Miki was staying as a postdoctoral fellow in Cris’s laboratory. Dr. Miki was a young graduate student at Nagoya University, Faculty of Science, Physics Department (of whom the big boss was the late Fumio Oosawa). I received my Ph.D. in 1975 from the Oosawa laboratory, and from January 1976 to March 1979, I was a postdoctoral fellow at MIT (Dr. Toyoichi Tanaka, my classmate in high
* Shin’ichi Ishiwata [email protected] 1
Department of Physics, Faculty of Science and Engineering, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan
school) and BBRI (Drs. John Gergely and Jack Seidel) in Boston for a total of 3 years and 3 months. I had not studied abroad since returning to Japan in April 1979. In 1987, my laboratory in Japan was finally on track, and the results of research were beginning to come out, so it was a time when I was confident that I could leave the laboratory for a month or so. However, when I went to Sydney, Cris decided to go to the USA during the summer vacation, and we ended up only overlapping for half of the month I was there. In addition, Dr. Miki said that his mother in Japan was feeling sick, so that he must return to Japan immediately from the Airport, where he welcomed me. Therefore, I could not meet Miki-san for the half a month that Cris was away. During their absence, my partner was Leo Phillips, a PhD student doing solid-state NMR studies of actin
Data Loading...
