Kozo Kaibuchi

Kozo Kaibuchi is a professor of the Department of Cell Pharmacology at Nagoya University, Graduate School of Medicine. He graduated from Kobe University, School of Medicine to become a medical doctor in 1980, and gained a PhD in Biochemstry from the same University working on protein kinase C in 1984. He then undertake postdoctoral work on molecular genetic analyses on yeast Ras and protein kinase C at DNAX Research Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Palo Alto in USA in 1985. He took up the junior faculty position at Kobe University in 1987, where he worked on the small GTPases including Ras, Rho and Rab. He then moved to take up the full professor of the Division of Signal Transduction at Nara Institute of Science and Technology in 1994. There, he discovered several effectors of the Rho family GTPases including Rho-kinase, and found Rho regulates cell contractility acting through myosin phosphorylation. He also dissected how the Rho family regulates cell migration, cell adhesion and cell polarity. He moved to Nagoya University in 2000, where he found CRMP-2 as a neuronal substrate of Rho-kinase and CRMP-2 controls neuronal polarity. He analyzed how extracellular and intracellular signals regulate neuronal polarity both in vitro and in vivo. His interest developed in molecular pathogenesis of psychiatric disorders including schizophrenia. He has recently developed a novel phospho-proteomic approach to comprehensively screen for substrates of protein kinases including Rho-kinase, protein kinase A and MAP-kinase, and to analyze how dopamine regulates neuronal excitability and reword-related behaviors.