I learned cytogenetics and fish biology in the Department of Fisheries at Kinki University as an undergraduate student. I moved to the National Institute of Genetics, Japan, for my PhD, supervised by Prof. Gojobori. I researched the evolution of sex chromosomes in teleost fish using cytogenetic and molecular methods; this work demonstrated that a highly differentiated sex chromosome system has been conserved in Aulopiformes. After my PhD, I took up a Research Fellowship of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) with Prof. Norihiro Okada. I spent part of this Fellowship in Peter Holland's lab, where I was cloning and analysing genes in hagfish (Eptatretus atami) to investigate the ancestry of duplicated regions in the vertebrate genome. I am now a Postdoctoral Researcher with Shigeru Karatani in the RIKEN CDB, Kobe, Japan.

Publications

Ota K, Kobayashi T, Ueno K, Gojobori T. (2000) Evolution of heteromorphic sex chromosomes in the order Aulopiformes. Gene 259 :25-30 (www...)

Ueno K, Ota K, Kobayshi T (2001) Heteromorphic sex chromosomes of lizardfish (Synodontide): focus on the ZZ-ZW1W2 system in Trachinocephalus myops. Genetica 111: 133-42 (www...)

Ota K, Tateno Y, Gojobori T (2003) Highly differentiated and conserved sex chromosome in fish species (Aulopus japonicus: Teleostei, Aulopidae) Gene 317: 187-93

Metaphase chromosomes of a female Aulopus japonicus hybridised with probes for 5S rDNA (green) and telomeric sequences (pink). White arrow: Z chromosome; white arrowhead: W chromosome.