Environmental Metabolic Analysis Research team

Our team intends for development of novel environmental analysis such as bird-eye viewing of metabolism caused by ecosystem biodiversity, based on technical advancements of our NMR approaches toward metabolite and biomass mixtures, as well as inorganic elements and microbial ecosystem analyses combined with bioinformatics and chemoinformatics approach. Namely, we promote both international and industrial collaboration in order to contribute for effective utilization of chemical resources, by analyzing laboratory systems, industrial (agriculture, forestry, fishery) process, and natural environment (hydro- and landsphere, as well as outer space).

Research Fields

Engineering / Chemistry / Biology & Biochemistry / Agricultural Sciences / Plant & Animal Science / Microbiology / Environment & Ecology / Multidisciplinary / Geosciences

• Technological advancement of various spectrometric measurements for complex biomolecular mixtures and microbiota
• Methodology development of data mining and accumulation of data bases for environmental measurements
• Sustainable utilization of land- and aquatic biomass based on studies of natural environmental purification ssystem
• Technology development of evaluation of environmental metabolic system, such as recovery of ecosystem of an earthquake-stricken district
• Symbiotic metabonomic analysis between animal (mammals, fishes and insects) and symbiotic microbiota in relation to their food nutrients

Publications

1. Date, Y., Iikura, T., Yamazawa, A., Moriya, S. and Kikuchi, J.*
   "Metabolic sequences of anaerobic fermentation on glucose-based feeding substrates based on correlation analyses of microbial and metabolite profiling"
   J. Proteome Res. 11, 5602-5610 (2012).
2. Okushita, K., Chikayama, E. and Kikuchi, J.*
   "Solubilization mechanism and characterization of the structural change of bacterial cellulose in regenerated states through ionic liquid treatment"
   Biomacromolecules. 13, 1323-1330 (2012).
3. Fukuda, S., Toh, H., Hase, K., Nakanishi, Y., Oshima, K., Yoshimura, K., Tobe, T., Clarke, J. M., Topping, D. L., Suzuki, T., Taylor, T. D., Itoh, K., Kikuchi, J., Morita, H., Hattori, M.*and Ohno, H.*
   "Bifidobacteria protect from enteropathogenic infection through production of acetate."
   Nature 469, 543-547 (2011).
4. Kikuchi, J.*, Ogata, Y. and Shinozaki, K.
   "ECOMICS: ECosytem trans-OMICS tools and methods for complex environmental samples and datasets"
   J. Ecosys. Ecogr. S2 001 (2011).
5. Sekiyama, Y., Chikayama, E. and Kikuchi, J.*
   "Evaluation of a semipolar solvent system as a step toward heteronuclear multidimensional NMR-based metabolomics for 13C-labeled bacteria, plants, and animals"
   Anal. Chem. 83, 719-726 (2011).
6. Nakanishi, Y., Fukuda, S., Chikayama, E. Kimura, Y., Ohno, H. and Kikuchi, J.*
   "Dynamic omics approach identifies nutrition-mediated microbial interactions"
   J. Proteome Res. 10, 824-831 (2011).
7. Sekiyama, Y., Chikayama, E. and Kikuchi, J.*
   "Profiling polar and semi-polar plant metabolites throughout extraction processes using a combined solution-state and HR-MAS NMR approach"
   Anal. Chem. 82, 1643-1652 (2010).
8. Chikayama, E., Sekiyama, E., Okamoto, M., Nakanishi, Y., Tsuboi, Y., Akiyama, K., Saito, K., Shinozaki, K. and Kikuchi, J.*
   "Statistical indices for simultaneous large-scale metabolite detections for a single NMR spectrum"
   Anal. Chem. 82, 1653-1658 (2010).
9. Ohyama, K., Suzuki, M., Kikuchi, J., Saito, K. and Muranaka, T.*
   "Dual biosynthetic pathways to phytosterol via cycloartenol and lanosterol in Arabidopsis"
   Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 106, 725-730 (2009).
10. Fukuda, S., Nakanishi, Y., Chikayama, E., Ohno, H., Hino, T. and Kikuchi, J.*
    "Evaluation and characterization of bacterial metabolic dynamics by a novel profiling technique, real-time metabolotyping"
    PLoS ONE 4, e4893 (2009).