Bio:

Yasuhiro ‘Yoshi’ Kyono is a Scientist III at the Seattle Hub for Synthetic Biology. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 2015. His dissertation work focused on DNA methylation changes that occur in the developing brain using frog metamorphosis as a model system (the process is controlled by thyroid hormone (TH)), and discovered that TH receptors directly activate a cis-regulatory element (enhancer) associated with a DNA methyltransferase gene (dnmt3a), which in turn modulates the DNA methylation landscape in the brain. During his postdoctoral training, he studied how enhancer activity is impacted by SNPs associated with human diseases (type 2 diabetes, pancreatic cancer), primarily using a massively parallel reporter assay (STARR-seq). He also contributed to generating whole-genome STARR-seq data for human cancer cell lines and patient-derived pancreatic cancer organoids for the ENCODE consortium. In the past few years, he worked as a staff scientist to investigate the molecular mechanism by which bacteria acquire cross-resistance to antibiotics after being exposed to non-antibiotic medications (e.g. antipsychotics) using genome-engineering tools such as lambda red recombineering and transposon insertion sequencing.