LINXS Chemistry of Life Core Group member, LINXS Fellow

Hitomi Sawai, Associate Professor at the Chemistry and Materials Engineering Program, Graduate School of Engineering, Nagasaki University, Japan.

Dr. Sawai has interested in protein-protein interactions involved in metal transport and trafficking, especially nutritional iron metabolism in human body. She is an expert to prepare many types of metalloproteins and metal transport chaperones including human membrane protein. She has built strong cooperative relationships with outstanding structural biologists of RIKEN/SPring-8 center to investigate structural and functional properties of those proteins at atomic and molecular levels by using some cutting-edge techniques (time-resolved spectroscopy and X-ray crystallography, SAXS, mass photometry, etc). She has a dream to capture how reactive or toxic metals are safely and efficiently selected, inserted, and regulated via various proteins, as a movie.