Kotaro Shirakawa

This study identifies the non-spike R204P mutation in the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron XEC variant as a driver of increased inflammation and pathogenicity through NF-κB activation.

This paper introduces CoVFit, a protein language model that predicts SARS-CoV-2 variant fitness using spike protein sequences, identifying fitness-enhancing mutations and predicting emerging variants.

This study introduces AkaBLI, a method using Akaluc bioluminescence to track SARS-CoV-2 infection in vivo with higher sensitivity than NanoLuc, showing its utility in monitoring viral dynamics and vaccine efficacy.

This study investigates the virological properties of the SARS-CoV-2 HK.3 variant, a FLip variant with substitutions S:L455F and S:F456L, to assess its growth advantage.

The paper assesses the humoral immune response to XBB.1.5 vaccine in infection-naive and XBB-infected individuals against various SARS-CoV-2 variants.

The paper presents nine alpaca nanobodies that recognize conserved hidden epitopes on SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins across variants and maintain neutralizing activity against escape mutations.

The paper develops NET-CAGE to detect nascent RNA 5-ends, identifies enhancer-promoter pairs, and reveals topological connections of cis-regulatory elements across cell types.