Research Topics

The discovery of carbon nanotubes has stimulated extensive research activities in science and engineering devoted to carbon nanostructures. Recently, the carbon nanotubes have been shown to possess remarkable mechanical, electrical and thermal properties leading to many potential applications. However, the mechanical properties of carbon nanotubes depend largely on their helicity and structures. Moreover, very limited studies have been done regard to the mechanical properties of the nanocomposites filled with CNTs, and an approach toward practical will be a challenging work. Current research includes:

・Buckling analysis of carbon nanotubes
・Mechanical properties if carbon nanotubes
・Electrical characteristics in carbon nanotube composites
・Development of carbon nanotube composites

Intracytoplasmic injection of rat round spermatids and spermatozoa resulted in the production of viable offspring. Such a microinsemination technique was successfully applied to the powder of rat spermatozoa freeze-dried and stored for 1 year in a conventional refrigerator (Published in Mol Reprod Dev, 2008).

Using the genetic and the protein engineering techniques, it has been elucidated how DNA repair enzyme (AP endonuclease) finds out damages of chromosomal DNA (Published in Nucleic Acids Res, 2006). New knowledge is provided about an enzyme/substrate complexation mechanism and can apply it to medicine designs based on three-dimensional structure information of the enzyme.

The luminous moss (Schistostega pennata), which is known as its green luminous reflection, is rarely found in the cave of mountainside. It is on the verge of extinction by the effect of environmental disruption. We have successfully cultured the luminous moss in vitro (patent application, 2005). The photograph shows green fluorescence of the cultured luminous moss.

Based on a concept of “self-recycle”, a number of problems with medical materials and cosmetics will be solved using self-originating biomaterial products instead of synthetic or non-self originating materials. From this point, human hair and nail are valuable sources to create safe and biocompatible products, because they are easily collected in large quantities from specific individuals and the protein contents are high. They developed novel procedures of protein extraction and film formation from these tissues.