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A new series of Science Café, is now underway. The popular public lecture has been running for more than a decade, giving Tohoku University's researchers a platform to share their work and engage in topical discussions with the community.

On May 15, Associate Professor Hafumi Nishi from the Systems Bioinformatics Laboratory at the Graduate School of Information Sciences, presented a lecture on protein. The event at Sendai Mediatheque attracted a capacity crowd of nearly 100 people.

Nishi spoke about protein from a molecular perspective, describing the way this essential nutrient looks and how it works in the human body. She then introduced bioinformatics, an interdisciplinary field combining biology and computer science. "It may sound strange that biology requires computers, but there are more than tens of thousands of types of protein molecules in the human body, so computers allow us to store and analyze the massive amount of data effectively."

She then brought up some computational research about evolution and medical science based on the protein data.

Nishi says that by having a basic knowledge of the molecular aspects of protein, participants can better understand medical issues like diseases and drugs. "This is because protein malfunction is one of the major reasons for diseases and many drugs work by neutralizing the negative effects of the malfunctioned protein. For example, in the lecture, I mentioned nivolumab, a medication of cancer, which is actually an antibody protein."

The lecture was followed by lively group discussions and a question and answer session.

Science Café is held once a month and is staffed and moderated by student volunteers.

Running in tandem is the humanities-based Liberal Arts Salon which starts its new season on May 31.

For now, both lecture series are only held in Japanese, but they are free and open to anyone who is interested. To take part, please check the schedule for upcoming dates and lecture topics.