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Tanaka Lab
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A lab that learns from the mechanisms of living organisms to create new materials and diagnostic technologies.
AboutAbout the lab
New technologies learned from living organisms.
Tanaka Lab studies the life phenomena of microorganisms and animal cells at the molecular level and works to put them to practical use.
The lab believes that if the reactions living organisms have refined over a long time can be understood and used as chemistry, technologies that support our daily lives can be created.
Currently, the lab is especially focused on technology for finding proteins that deform cell membranes during processes such as cell division, and on analyzing their functions.
The lab also aims to develop environmentally friendly ways to make functional nanoparticles, using peptides that mimic how bones and teeth form.
Key terms
- Biomineralization
- The process by which living organisms form minerals inside their bodies, as in bones and teeth.
- Peptide
- A molecule made of a few to a few dozen amino acids linked together. It is shorter than a protein.
- Membrane curvature-sensing protein
- A protein that senses how curved a cell membrane is, binds to it, and maintains its shape.
NewsLab news
Paper on a method for finding membrane curvature-sensing proteins published in Adv. Sci.
Press release on research growing gold nanoparticles inside liposomes
A master's student received the Outstanding Presentation Award at the master's thesis research plan presentation
Press release on research creating three-dimensional structures with microorganisms
Paper on detecting nanoplastics with gold nanoparticles published in Talanta Open
ResearchResearch themes
The lab advances the molecular-level understanding of life phenomena in microorganisms and animal cells, and aims to put it to practical use. This leads to the development of new pharmaceuticals, production technologies for useful biomolecules, and synthesis technologies for functional nanomaterials.
*Illustrative imageProteins that sense membrane curvature
Uniformly sized spherical SiO2 particles are coated with biological membrane to artificially prepare membranes with different curvatures. By comparing the proteins that bind to them, the lab developed a technique to comprehensively search for membrane curvature-sensing proteins, and discovered new proteins from breast cancer cells and E. coli.
*Illustrative imageMaking metal nanoparticles with peptides
The lab searches for biomineralization peptides that form nanoparticles simply by mixing with metal ions at room temperature. It synthesizes and screens many sequences arranged on peptide arrays, and is working on applying triangular nanoplates that absorb near-infrared light to photothermal therapy for cancer.
*Illustrative imageSensors made with peptides
The lab develops peptide-based probe materials for biosensors. Small molecules such as TNT bind too weakly to linear peptides, but the lab found that attaching cysteines to both ends and linking them on the sensor surface gives binding strength comparable to that of antibodies.
MembersFaculty
The members of Tanaka Lab consist of faculty, technical support staff, and doctoral, master's, and undergraduate students.As of 2026
- Associate ProfessorMasayoshi TanakaPublications ↗
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Report an errorAbout the images
The top and research theme images are illustrative and were not taken at the lab. They are cropped from Wikimedia Commons images. Cropped CC BY-SA images are provided under the same CC BY-SA license as the original (version shown on each line).
- Top image: “Gold Nanoparticles' aggregation” Nadiia Honcharenko / CC BY 4.0 (cropped)
- Proteins that sense membrane curvature: “Phosphatidylcholine liposomes stained with acridine orange” ArkhipovSergey / CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped)
- Making metal nanoparticles with peptides: “Gold nanoparticles as indicators” Valeg96 / CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped)
- Sensors made with peptides: “Biacore 3000 Surface Plasmon Resonance (SPR) Instrument” PlaxcoLab / CC BY 2.0 (cropped)
- Related lab (Serizawa-Sawada Lab): “Paper. Magnification power 2000x. 01” Nobody16w / CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped)
- Related lab (Harada Lab): “CO2-Wäscher” IUTAe.V. / CC BY-SA 3.0 de (cropped)
- Related lab (Mori Lab): “Glow discharge regions” Derived file: Chetvorno Original file: Jannis Andrija Schnitzer / CC BY-SA 2.0 (cropped)
- Related lab (Hayashi Lab): “A Problem with Polymer Theory” OLCF / CC BY 2.0 (cropped)
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