Dr. Yoshiharu Muto joined the Department of Medicine in the Division of Nephrology as an instructor in April 2023. He pursued PhD training at Kyushu University in Japan, where his PhD thesis work in the lab of Dr. Keiichi Nakayama focused on the cellular iron metabolism regulated by FBXL5-IRP2 axis. Through this work, he gained expertise in molecular and cellular biology techniques and bulk transcriptomic profiling. Meanwhile, through his PhD training and learning computational analysis, he developed an interest in single cell biology, which allowed him to comprehensively understand renal pathophysiology. This interest prompted Dr. Muto to join the laboratory of Dr. Benjamin Humphreys, a physician-scientist with deep expertise in single cell RNA sequencing at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, in 2018.
Thus far, he has learned single nucleus RNA sequencing techniques and computational analytic skills. He applied paired single nucleus RNA-seq and ATAC-seq to human kidneys, characterizing the failed-repair populations of proximal tubular cells in healthy human kidneys. Next, he applied the single nucleus multimodal approach to human ADPKD kidneys, identifying a novel cyst cell marker GPRC5A and disease-specific epigenetic mechanism driving its expression. Dr. Muto is now starting to transition to independence, with the goal of becoming an NIH-funded principal investigator focusing on dissection of common CKD pathogenesis and development of a novel therapeutic approaches. His long-term research goal is to dissect the mechanism of chronic kidney disease progression, and to develop effective therapeutic strategies.