Professor Kume Group

Sleep and Circadian rhythm studies using Drosophila melanogaster

Drosophila melanogaster has been used for genetic behavioral studies for more than 4 decades since Seymour Benzer and his colleague found circadian rhythm mutant, period and others in 1970's. It has emerged also as a sleep model in 2000. We have been working on this model since 2000, and discovered, 'fumin' (insomnia) mutant, which was shown to lack dopamine transporter. We, recently clarified dopamine circuit regulating sleep and arousal. Our present interest is to understand how arousal is regulated in Drosophila.

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Sleep Epidemiology and Sleep Disorders

One out of 5 Japanese people have sleep problems. We collaborate with a couple of companies to understand, and resolve these problems. One out come is, we developed a contactless sleep monitor with Omron Healthcare company. This device is affordable and now on the consumer market. We are now interested in gathering mass sleep data and hope to contribute to establish sleep epidemiology.

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Associate Professor Ohsawa Group

Pain Control

More than 22 million people in the world are suffering from chronic pain. We are working on the understaing of the mechanism and the development of the treatment of the neural pains.

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Higher Brain Function and Metabolic Disease

With the rapid increase of aged diabetes patients, cognitive impairments, especially dementia, caused by metabolic diseases emerged as a big problem. We are investigating the relationship between diabetes and cognive functions using mouse model.

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Cachexy in Cancer Patients

Cachexy is one of the leading causes which deteriorates the quality of patients with terminal illness. We are examinig its mechanism using a mouse model.

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