Top Lab: Dr. Masahiro Sota

My research field and interest are bacterial mobile elements, especially transposons and conjugative plasmids, which carry many kinds of genetic traits such as resistance to antibiotics and/or degradability of xenobiotics. Interceller transfer of conjugative plasmids and intramolecular movement of transposons have contributed to the dissemination of such phenotypic traits among phylogenetically distant bacteria, resulting in the bacterial rapid adaptation to novel environmental stresses. Recent sequence data of bacterial plasmids have implied their evolutional histories, i. e., acquisition of various genetic traits in a common backbone generated the diversity of bacterial plasmids. However, little is done to prove the evolution. My present study is to investigate the evolutionary mechanism of plasmids in the lab-scale experiments.

1992-1996 Department of Agriculture in Osaka Prefecture University (BS

degree in Agriculture)

1996-1998 Graduate School of Agriculture and Biological Sciences in Osaka

Prefecture University (MS degree in Agriculture)

2001-2004 Graduate School of Life Sciences in Tohoku University (PhD degree

in Life Sciences)

Dean Prize of Graduate School of Life Sciences, Tohoku University (2004)