RIKEN Baton Zone Program Yokoyama Laboratory
Head of Yokoyama Laboratory: Shigeyuki Yokoyama (Ph.D.)
Research Summary

We aim at contribution to our industrial partners' developments of superior drugs (chemical compounds, antibodies, etc.) against drug targets (human membrane proteins, etc.) by fully taking advantage of our own technologies developed for production and structure determination of challenging human membrane proteins and for application of unnatural amino acids to biologics. We will establish next-generation drug discovery technologies by fulfilling the needs elicited through implementation of our technologies into drug development endeavor at pharmaceutical partners. We will coevolve basic and applied researches, by applying the developed chemicals and antibodies to basic researches at RIKEN toward discovery of novel drug targets.
Main Research Fields
- Biological Sciences
Related Research Fields
- Chemistry
- Biology
- Medicine, Dentistry & Pharmacy
Keywords
- Structures and functions of disease-related membrane proteins
- Structures and functions of disease-related membrane proteins
- Development of biologics
- Site-specific incorporation of unnatural amino acids by genetic-code expansion
- X-ray crystallography
Selected Publications
- 1.Sengoku, T., Suzuki, T., Dohmae, N., Watanabe, C., Honma, T., Hikida, Y., Yamaguchi, Y., Takahashi, H., Yokoyama, S. and Yanagisawa, T.:
"Structural basis of protein arginine rhamnosylation by glycosyltransferase EarP"
Nature Chemical Biology, 14, 368-374 (2018). - 2.Hori, T., Okuno, T., Hirata, K., Yamashita, K., Kawano, Y., Yamamoto, M., Hato, M., Nakamura, M., Shimizu, T., Yokomizo, T., Miyano, M. and Yokoyama, S.:
"Na+-mimicking ligands stabilize the inactive state of leukotriene B4 receptor BLT1"
Nature Chemical Biology, 14, 262-269 (2018). - 3.Kashiwagi, K., Takahashi, M., Nishimoto, M., Hiyama, T. B., Higo, T., Umehara, T., Sakamoto, K., Ito, T. and Yokoyama, S.:
"Crystal structure of eukaryotic translation initiation factor 2B"
Nature, 531, 122-125 (2016). - 4.Tanabe, H., Fujii, Y., Okada-Iwabu, M., Iwabu, M., Nakamura, Y., Hosaka, T., Motoyama, K., Ikeda, M., Wakiyama, M., Terada, T., Ohsawa, N., Hato, M., Ogasawara, S., Hino, T., Murata, T., Iwata, S., Hirata, K., Kawano, Y., Yamamoto, M., Kimura-Someya, T., Shirouzu, M., Yamauchi, T., Kadowaki, T. and Yokoyama, S.:
"Crystal structures of the human adiponectin receptors"
Nature, 520, 312-316 (2015). - 5.Naganuma, M., Sekine, S., Chong, Y. E., Guo, M., Yang, X. L., Gamper, H., Hou, Y. M., Schimmel, P., and Yokoyama, S.:
"The selective tRNA aminoacylation mechanism based on a single G・U pair."
Nature, 510, 507-511 (2014). - 6.Itoh, Y., Bröcker, M. J., Sekine, S., Hammond, G., Suetsugu, S., Söll, D. and and Yokoyama, S.:
"Decameric SelA ・ tRNASec ring structure reveals mechanism of bacterial selenocysteine formation"
Science, 340, 75-78 (2013). - 7.Tagami, S., Sekine, S., Kumarevel, T., Hino, N., Murayama, Y., Kamegamori, S., Yamamoto, M., Sakamoto, K. and Yokoyama, S.:
"Crystal structure of bacterial RNA polymerase bound with a transcription inhibitor protein"
Nature, 468, 978-982 (2010). - 8.Ito, T. and Yokoyama, S.:
"Two enzymes bound to one transfer RNA assume alternative conformations for consecutive reactions"
Nature, 467, 612-616 (2010). - 9.Shimada, A., Niwa, H., Tsujita, K., Suetsugu, S., Nitta, K., Hanawa-Suetsugu, K., Akasaka, R., Nishino, Y., Toyama, M., Chen, L., Liu, ZJ., Wang, BC., Yamamoto, M., Terada, T., Miyazawa, A., Tanaka, A., Sugano, S., Shirouzu, M., Nagayama, K., Takenawa, T. and Yokoyama, S.:
"Curved EFC/F-BAR domain dimers are joined end to end into a filament for membrane invagination in endocytosis"
Cell, 129, 761-772 (2007). - 10.Sengoku, T., Nureki, O., Nakamura, A., Kobayashi, S. and Yokoyama, S.:
"Structural basis for RNA unwinding by the DEAD-box protein Drosophila Vasa"
Cell, 125, 287-300 (2006).
Recent Research Results
Lab Members
Principal investigator
- Shigeyuki Yokoyama
- Head of Yokoyama Laboratory
Core members
- Tetsuya Hori
- Senior Scientist
- Yoshihiro Nakamura
- Research Scientist
- Eiko Seki
- Research Scientist
- Jianxing Chen
- Postdoctoral Researcher
- Hiroaki Tanabe
- Research Associate
- Seisuke Kusano
- Research Associate
- Shingo Saito
- Research Associate
- Tomoko Nakayama
- Research Associate
- Takako Imada
- Technical Staff I
Contact Information
West Research Building
1-7-22 Suehiro-cho, Tsurumi-ku,
Yokohama City 230-0045, Japan
Email: yokoyama [at] riken.jp