Do you remember a sheep cloned from an adult cell was published in "Nature" in 1997? Since then, we have many chances to watch the news reporting animals and livestock. We are glad that many people become to be interested in and understand our fields. In 2001, "mad cow disease" (bovine sponge form encephalopathy: BSE) was discovered in our country, and it has aroused many kinds of controversies. These events remind us that bringing up healthy livestock and producing safe animal products are still attended with many difficulties. No doubt clone technology or embryo transfer are useful to develop livestock, plants or crops having excellent hereditary capacities. However, we need to feed and bring up them for a certain time, and many environmental factors, especially nutritional supplies, can influence their growth. In the Laboratory of Nutritional Biochemistry, we educate and research the conditions of food and the responses of animals to these. Our recent interests are as follows: 1) the regulations of energy consumption by amino acids in chicken, 2) the central nervous regulations of feeding behavior in chicken, and 3) the mechanisms of the protein synthesis in muscle and liver activated by certain amino acids. All of these researches are necessary to keep livestock healthy and to produce good quality products. We try to make clear the unknown mechanisms in cells, tissues, and organs, and piece together these knowledges, and we believe that these diligent researches are important for understanding the responses of animals.

 

Professor Kunio SUGAHARA I educate and research to understand an animal by knowing mechanism of energy consumption in animals.

Associate Professor Fumiaki YOSHIZAWA I am interested in Nutritional regulation of protein synthesis. I research about regulation in translation step.

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