Abstract
Dr. Katsuko Kakinuma made many important contributions to biology and medicine through the study of the neutrophil NADPH oxidase system, particularly in the investigation of how redox centers transfer an electron to oxygen. In the late 1970s, she moved to the Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Medical Sciences, where she started her own research as the director in the Department of Inflammation Research. Her special interest was in identifying and observing the key players that are able to pass an electron to oxygen, followed by the generation of superoxide anions by the neutrophil NADPH oxidase system. She started her contributions by solving the “NADPH vs NADH controversy”, identifying the native substrate for the superoxide-generating oxidase in neutrophils. Subsequently, she examined the roles of the flavin molecule, FAD, and the heme of cytochrome b558 in the NADPH oxidase system using spectroscopic methods, performing a detailed analysis of the electron flow from NADPH to oxygen through these redox centers. This chapter describes how these studies were achieved by her research team.
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Acknowledgments
All members of the Department of Inflammation Research at the Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Medical Sciences, who were active at the time that Dr. Kakinuma was the director, thank all the researchers who visited the laboratory, for their valuable and enthusiastic discussions and collaborations. The authors thank Dr. Akio Tomoda, Department of Biochemistry, Tokyo Medical University, for reading this manuscript and for his helpful suggestions.
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Fujii, H.G., Yoshida, L.S. (2023). On Katsuko Kakinuma: Spectroscopic Studies of Redox Centers in NADPH Oxidase – “Identifying and Observing the Key Players that Pass an Electron to Oxygen”. In: Pick, E. (eds) NADPH Oxidases Revisited: From Function to Structure. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23752-2_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23752-2_6
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