Naoyuki Yamamoto

Solubilisation of [60]fullerenes using block copolymers and evaluation of their photodynamic activities

Unmodified [60]fullerenes (C60) were solubilised with high stability using various type of poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG) based block copolymer micelles. Block copolymer micelle-incorporated C60 fullerenes were studied in cultures for biological activities using human cervical cancer HeLa cells. As a result, the cationic block copolymer micelles delivered C60 into the cells depending on their surface densities and showed cytotoxicity under photoirradiation.

Use of transcriptional sequencing in difficult to read areas of the genome.

In genome and cDNA sequencing projects, current cycle sequencing often encounters difficult-to-sequence templates which have unique secondary structures due to GC-rich composition or repeated regions. Due to the formation of stable secondary structures, remarkable decreases in fluorescent signals are observed in cycle sequencing reactions. It is not easy to determine the nucleotide sequences of these regions. Although several modifications of sequencing reactions have been tried to overcome these problems, some unreadable regions remain as gaps in genome sequencing projects. Here, we further developed transcriptional sequencing technology and evaluated the sequencing accuracy in these regions. The method was successively applied to artificial GC cluster templates and putative secondary structure-forming templates from genomic and cDNA clones. Our results indicate that transcriptional sequencing is a powerful and accurate method for GC-rich regions, simple sequence repeats, hairpins (inverted repeats), tandem repeat DNA templates, and gap-closing in draft sequencing data.