iTHEMS Coffee Meeting is held on every Friday from 12:30- at our common room. From this fiscal year, we have changed the style of the short talk at the coffee meeting. The speaker will give a 15 min. talk only using blackboard without taking questions.
The talk could be a scientific problem that the speaker is facing and wants to ask advise, an interdisciplinary scientific proposal that the speaker wants to form a collaboration, an elementary introduction to a particular topic or notion, etc.

So far, this new attempt is working very well. For example, the speaker last week (Aug.24) was Gen Kurosawa who gave a talk “On the unsolved mystery of biological clock”. He posed unsolved questions on biological clock which induced lots of questions and discussions by the iTHEMS members after his talk.

As usual, we have nice cookies and candies brought from all over the world by the iTHEMS members and coffee/tea/soft-drinks prepared by iTHEMS assistants. Thanks all for supporting the coffee meeting!

Thanks to the accumulation of molecular knowledges about biological clock, we can predict a missing link “X” in the system by using a realistic simulator. Meal-time is known to influence our sleep-wake timing. But the mechanism has been unknown. This time, the group of Dr. Okamura at Kyoto University discovered a new enzyme (named, Ck1δ2) that possibly links between our metabolic system and biological clock. Based on the experimental results by Dr. Okamura, two iTHEMS members (Gibo and Kurosawa) predicted the specific biochemical process, activated by the new enzyme. The prediction was conducted by using a 190 variables model with all genes and proteins. Fortunately, the prediction was confirmed experimentally. The point for the prediction was the activation of the new enzyme “slowed” the biological clock in the experiment while the activation of most enzymes “accelerate” the clock in the simulator. Now, the mechanism is studied by using a simpler model. Then, a possible scenario is that amino-acids in our food influence our sleep-wake timing via the new enzyme.