Yoshizumi Ishino


Yoshizumi Ishino is a Japanese molecular biologist, known for his discovering the DNA sequence of Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats.

Research contribution

Ishino has contributed to the development of enzymology and nucleic acids research in his life. In 1987, he discovered the DNA sequence of CRISPR, which is a basis of a biotechnology known as CRISPR-Cas9 that effectively edits genes. The "iap" gene in gut microbe E. coli was sequenced by Ishino and his colleagues in 1987. Yoshizumi Ishino was one of the first scientists to have detected CRISPRs in E. coli. Research of DNA replication of Archaea began by Yoshi in 1990.

Biography

Ishino was born in Kyoto Prefecture, Japan. He received his BS, MS and PhD in 1981, 1983 and 1986, respectively, from Osaka University. From 1987 to 1989, he served as a post-doctoral fellow in Dieter Söll's laboratory at Yale University.
In 2002, he became a professor at Kyushu University. Since October 2013, he has been a member of the NASA Astrobiology Institute, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.
After the completion of Yoshizumi's PHD, he became senior research scientist at the Bioproducts Development Center of Takara Shuzo. Later in life, he joined BERI, in which he conducted research on nucleic acids-related enzymes.

Recognition