Extra Rudbeckseminarium - Makoto Saito

Biografi

Makoto Saito, Ph.D.
RIKEN ECL Team Leader, RIKEN Pioneering Research Institute (PRI)

Makoto Saito is a team leader at the RIKEN Pioneering Research Institute (PRI), where he leads the Biophenomena Engineering Research Team. His research focuses on exploring biological diversity and molecular evolution to discover previously unknown biological systems and develop them into nextgeneration biotechnologies.
Saito received his Ph.D. from the University of Basel in 2019, conducting his doctoral research at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research (FMI) in the laboratory of Patrick Matthias. His doctoral work investigated the histone deacetylase 6 acetylome and revealed a role for protein deacetylation in regulating liquid-liquid phase separation and the dynamics of stress granules.
In 2019, he joined Feng Zhang’s laboratory at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard as a postdoctoral fellow and was promoted to Senior Scientific Fellow in 2024. There, he searched for biological systems
that could be harnessed as genome-editing tools. His work contributed to the discovery and characterization of diverse RNA-guided systems, including CRISPR-associated transposases, Fanzor, the first eukaryotic
CRISPR-Cas-like programmable DNA endonuclease, and TIGR-Tas, a family of compact RNA-guided systems found in prokaryotes and their viruses.
In January 2025, Saito established his independent research team at RIKEN PRI. His laboratory combines computational approaches, including artificial intelligence, with molecular and structural biology to identify unexplored biological systems across the tree of life, determine their molecular mechanisms, and engineer them into useful technologies. Through this work, he aims to uncover molecular functions created
by evolution and translate biological diversity into new molecular tools for next-generation biotechnology and medicine.

Three recent representative publications:

1. Faure, G., Saito, M., Wilkinson, M. E., Quinones-Olvera, N., Xu, P., Flam-Shepherd, D., Kim, S., Reddy, N., Zhu, S., Evgeniou, L., Koonin, E. V., Macrae, R. K. and Zhang, F.

TIGR-Tas: A family of modular RNA-guided DNA-targeting systems in prokaryotes and their viruses.

Science 388, eadv9789, 2025.

2. Saito, M., Xu, P., Faure, G., Maguire, S., Kannan, S., Altae-Tran, H., Vo, S., Desimone, A., Macrae, R. K. and Zhang, F. (equal contribution)

Fanzor is a eukaryotic programmable RNA-guided endonuclease.

Nature 620, 660-668, 2023.

3. Saito, M., Ladha, A., Strecker, J., Faure, G., Neumann, E., Altae-Tran, H., Macrae, R. K. and Zhang, F. (equal contribution)

Dual modes of CRISPR-associated transposon homing.

Cell 184, 2441-2453, 2021.