Shinya Kuroda
Leads a systems biology lab that studies how cells decode the timing of hormone signals, with insulin and mTORC1-S6K as the main test case
Professor, Department of Biological Sciences, Graduate School of Science, The University of Tokyo
Kuroda Lab (Systems Biology), University of Tokyo (Tokyo, Japan) ↗ ORCID0000-0001-5059-8299 ↗
Portrait: researchmap (Japan Science and Technology Agency) profile of Shinya Kuroda
Shinya Kuroda runs the systems biology laboratory in the University of Tokyo's Department of Biological Sciences. His group starts from a simple observation: the same stimulus can lead to different outcomes depending on how it arrives over time. They pair experiments with computer models to work out how signalling networks turn a pattern into a decision, and more recently how whole metabolic networks shift in obesity.
He is senior author on both Atlas studies on this idea, KUB2012 in cultured liver cells and KUB2018 in the liver of living rats. Together they show that insulin information is split by timing. S6K, the kinase mTORC1 switches on, responds to fast insulin pulses, while other targets respond to the slow baseline. This is one of the clearest cases in the Atlas where the shape of a signal over time matters as much as how strong it is, which is the question behind Oliver's focus on mTOR dynamics.
Milestones in the Atlas
| Year | Evidence | Study |
|---|---|---|
| 2012 | M | Temporal coding of insulin action through multiplexing of the AKT pathway KUB2012 Senior author. Showed that the AKT pathway carries pulse and sustained insulin signals as separate time patterns, which downstream targets such as S6K decode selectively. |
| 2018 | A | In Vivo Decoding Mechanisms of the Temporal Patterns of Blood Insulin by the Insulin-AKT Pathway in the Liver KUB2018 Senior author. Confirmed the same timing code in living rat liver and used modelling to explain it through network structure, sensitivity and time constants. |
Co-authors in the Atlas
People with a profile here who share at least one study with Shinya Kuroda.
- Hiroyuki Kubota 2 shared studies Systems biologist who showed that the insulin pathway carries different messages in the timing of its signal, and that S6K, the mTORC1 target, reads only the fast part