News & Topics

January 9, 2026: A review article on the UFM1 system has been published in Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology. This article is co-authored by Prof. Komatsu, Prof. Inada from the University of Tokyo, and Prof. Noda from Hokkaido University.
December 29, 2025: We hosted a seminar featuring Prof. Jin-A Lee from Hannam University.（Photo1/Photo2).
November 3, 2025: A comment article on the Japan autophagy consortium has been published in Nature Structural & Molecular Biology.
October 9, 2025: A review article on the UFM1 system has been published in Essays in Biochemistry.
September 29 - October 2, 2025: The 17th Autophagy Conference and the Second International Leading Research Retreat took place.
July 13, 2025: We celebrated the 15th Anniversary of the Komatsu Lab (Photo1/Photo2).
May 28, 2025: Our paper "KEAP1 retention in phase-separated p62 bodies drives liver damage in autophagy-deficient conditions" has been published in EMBO Reports.
May 11-15, 2025: The 6th Sino-Japanese Autophagy Conference was held in Kumamoto from May 11 to 15, 2025, with a total of 75 participants from China, Taiwan and Japan (Photo).
March 3, 2025: Prof. Komatsu received the J-STAR Best Mentor Award for his guidance of Kurusu-san, who had been enrolled in the Basic Research Medical Program, leading him to deliver an outstanding research paper and presentations （Kurusu, Fujimoto, Morishita et al., Dev Cell 2023）(Photo).
November 18, 2024: Prof. Komatsu's Plenary Lecture celebrating the 19th Kakiuchi Samuro Memorial Award is now available on the website of the Japanese Biochemistry Society（photo）.
October 17, 2024: Mao-san, a Ph.D. student, received an Excellent Poster Award for Young Scientists at the 16th Autophagy Research Meeting（photo）.
October 17, 2024: The 16th Autophagy Conference and the First International Leading Research Retreat took place at Tsumagoi Resort SAI-NO-SATO in Kakegawa from October 14 to 17, 2024 as a co-hosted Research Meeing.
October 8, 2024: An auto-commentary to our article (EMBO J 2023) was published in Autophagy Reports (as a punctum).
July 4, 2024: Our research results were published as a "Reviewed Preprint" in eLife (Ichimura, et al.).
July 2, 2024: Professor Masaaki Komatsu receives the 19th Samuro Kakiuchi Memorial Award.
June 21, 2024: Prof. Komatsu attended and lectured at the China-Japan Autophagy Conference, which took place in Datong, China from June 17 to 21, 2024. The Conference was organized by Dr. Hong Zhang, an International hub member of Prof. Komatsu's JSPS Project, "International Leading Research".（photo）
June 4, 2024: We hosted a seminar featuring Prof. Viktor Korolchuk from Newcastle University.（photo）
April 24, 2024: The review article by Prof. Komatsu, "p62 bodies: Phase separation, NRF2 activation, and selective autophagic degradation", was among the top 10 most-cited papers in the journal of IUBMB Life between January 2022 and December 2023.