Every single Drosophila cell stayed rhythmic, even when the cells divided.
1. Stories of Women in Neuroscience features Dr. Emi Nagoshi, centered on her route from animal behavior to circadian biology and neurodegeneration.
2. Marguerite interviews Dr. Emi Nagoshi, an associate professor and principal investigator at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, and the Nagoshi Lab studies circadian biology and neurodegeneration.
3. The episode asks how a scientist moves from early behavioral interests to molecular neuroscience while building a lab through chance, training, and persistence.
4. Emi Nagoshi says she first became interested in animal behavior around age 11 or 12 after reading Conrad Lorenz books.
5. She explains that she initially imagined becoming a veterinarian, then decided in high school to study science instead.
6. During her biology degree at Tohoku University in Sendai, she worked in a Drosophila lab that tracked fruit fly behavior and analyzed feeding behavior mathematically.
7. Her bachelor and master’s projects were not neuroscience, but bacterial genetics, recombination, DNA repair, and later cell biology work related to cholesterol metabolism.
8. She says neuroscience was housed in the medical faculty rather than the biology faculty, so she chose among plant science, animal physiology, molecular biology, and developmental biology.
9. For graduate study, she moved toward neuroscience in a medical school and joined a cell biology lab that planned to start a neurobiology project.
10. That early neurobiology project failed in a small group of three or four researchers, so she completed her master’s work in cell biology and gene therapy instead.
11. Her PhD focused on SREBP2, a steroid regulatory element binding protein anchored to the ER membrane and involved in steroid metabolism.
12. She says the project tested nuclear transport mechanisms and found that SREBP2 binds importin-beta directly rather than using importin-alpha first.
13. Her group also found that dimerization through a helix-loop-helix structure was important for the beta interaction and nuclear transport.
14. A structural biology collaboration later crystallized the complex and matched the biochemical prediction exactly.
15. After her PhD and first postdoc, she says she had no firm plan beyond continuing research and finding some academic job.
16. She describes a later move to Switzerland as driven by the attractiveness of Uli Schibler’s circadian biology papers and by the fact that many new circadian genes were being discovered around 2000 and 2001.
17. In her first postdoc, she asked how cell division affects circadian rhythm in cultured cells and used fluorescent reporter cells to observe individual cells by microscope.
18. She says pooled cells can look arrhythmic because they lose synchrony, while single cells remain rhythmic and keep that rhythmicity through division.
19. Her tone is reflective and practical, with long-form answers, detailed method descriptions, and repeated emphasis on survival, chance, and scientific curiosity.
20. Listeners who like molecular cell biology, Drosophila genetics, and career path stories would likely enjoy it, while people wanting a short, highly technical neuroscience methods discussion might skip it.
