Yusuke Toyama

Research Areas

• Tissue mechanics, Tissue homeostasis, Apoptosis, Immune cells

Research Interests

One of the mechanisms by which unnecessary, aged, or damaged cells are eliminated from epithelial tissue to maintain its homeostasis is apoptosis, or programmed cell death. It is well known that apoptotic cells are cleared, and impaired clearance causes inflammatory or autoimmune disease. We have been studying how apoptotic cells are extruded from neighboring non-apoptotic cells and found that cytoskeletal rearrangements in neighboring cells (which are driven by the contraction of actomyosin cables) are required to squeeze apoptotic cells from the tissue.

More recently, we have found that these changes in the neighboring cells may not be sufficient to expel a dead cell out of the tissue in the 3D space. We are therefore investigating how the physical removal of apoptotic cells from an epithelium is in part driven by immune cells, and whether this mechanical function of immune cells is necessary to maintain tissue homeostasis during apoptosis. To investigate this we adopt an interdisciplinary approach that incorporates imaging, quantitative image analysis, gene manipulation (including optogenetics), biophysical perturbation, bioengineering tools for force measurement, biophysical modeling, and machine learning.

Biography

Dr Toyama had a formal training in physics and engineering during graduate (Osaka Univ.) and undergraduate (Hokkaido Univ.) school in Japan. In 2003, he earned a Ph.D. in Engineering where his doctoral work was focused on plasma physics and laser driven nuclear fusion. He then embraced biophysics and mechanobiology during his postdoctoral carrier at Duke Univ. under supervision of Prof. Glenn Edwards (Physics department) and Prof. Dan Kiehart (Biology department). Dr Toyama joined Department of Biological Sciences at National University of Singapore as an Assistant Professor in 2010, and promoted as an Associate Professor in 2018. He also has an appointment as a Principal Investigator in Mechanobiology Institute since 2010.

Education

• PhD Osaka University, Japan