Unit Leader

Yuichi Taniguchi (Ph.D.)

We are pursuing systems-level biology of single cells by developing innovative technologies that quantify comprehensive properties of individual single cells. Such single cell analyses are essential for understanding the causality of biological processes such as cell differentiation and disease occurrence. We quantify single cells by providing their precise molecular numbers and spatiotemporal localizations within the scope of the genome, transcriptome, proteome and metabolome. In parallel, recent single cell technologies will be applied to characterize the heterogeneity in the functions of single cells and investigate its correlation to biological effects. Ultimately, we aim to provide key principles for the understanding and control of complex cellular systems.

Research Topics

• Development of single-molecule imaging methods of gene expression in single cells.
• Establishment of methods for gene expression analysis in higher organisms.
• Development of high-throughput methods for genome-wide analyses of single cells.
• Analysis of single-cell gene expression in a variety of biological processes.
• Modeling of complex gene expression networks in single cells.

Selected Publications

• Taniguchi, Y.
  "Genome-Wide Analysis of Protein and mRNA Copy Numbers in Single Escherichia coli Cells with Single-Molecule Sensitivity"
  Methods Mol. Biol. 1346, 55-67 (2015) doi:10.1007/978-1-4939-2987-0_5
• Ohno, M., Karagiannis, P. & Taniguchi, Y.
  "Protein Expression Analyses at the Single Cell Level"
  Molecules 19, 13932-13947 (2014) doi:10.3390/molecules190913932
• Taniguchi, Y., Choi, P. J., Li, G., Chen, H., Babu, M., Hearn, J., et al.
  "Quantifying E-coli Proteome and Transcriptome with Single-Molecule Sensitivity in Single Cells"
  Science 329, 533-538 (2010) doi:10.1126/science.1188308
• Taniguchi, Y., Nishiyama, M., Ishii, Y. & Yanagida, T.
  "Entropy rectifies the Brownian steps of kinesin."
  Nature Chem. Biol. 1, 342-347 (2005)