Itoshi Nikaido. Ph.D

Team Leader: Laboratory for Bioinformatics Research, RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research

Professor: Department of Functional Genome Informatics, Division of Medical Genomics, Medical Research Institute, Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU)

Advisor: Knowledge Palette, Inc.

A multicellular organism is orchestrated by cell growth, death, differentiation, and communication at the single-cell level. To understand various crucial biological phenomena, we should massively perturb and measure transcriptomes and epigenomes at the single-cell level.

My research interest is the development of novel methods of comprehensive analysis and perturbation of transcriptome and epigenome at the single-cell level, in particular, by applying massively parallel DNA sequencing, genome editing, microfluidics, and machine learning. I focus on the development of methods for quantifying and controlling cell function, fate, and cell-cell communication at the single-cell level. Our academic research team has already reported novel single-cell RNA-sequencing methods, such as Quartz-Seq2 and RamDA-seq, which are highly reproducible and sensitive methods of quantifying single-cell transcriptome.