LI Zi yuan Interviews with students in the international program in the School of Advanced Science and Engineering

Well, I’m from China, from a small town called Yueyang, near the city of Changsha, in Hunan Province, in the middle of China. I went to Chongqing, the capital city of my province, for high school. And then I got an opportunity to apply to Waseda and I jumped at the chance — Waseda is quite a famous university all over China.
So I’ve now been in Japan for four years, and I’m getting ready to complete my bachelor’s degree.

Mainly, I’m investigating the protein molecules involved in the contraction mechanism in muscle fibers.

Basically, as you may know, the muscle fibers or muscle cells are responsible for muscle contractions, which provide movement in the body. And inside the cells, we have an elongated kind of structure called a myofibril. This consists of repeated segments, called sarcomeres, which are the basic unit of striated muscle tissue. The sarcomeres consist of two types of long, filamentous structures, thick filaments and thin filaments, which slide past each other when a muscle contracts. The thin filaments are composed of the protein actin, and thick filaments consist of myosin II. Those two proteins interact with each other, and this creates the mechanical force that contracts the muscle.

My research topic in Prof. Uyeda’s lab is to investigate the specific manner in which they interact. It’s quite a broad project, and really tough. So I won’t be able to proceed to the next phase of the research. I won’t be able to finish before finals, within one year. But I’ll be able to achieve the short-term goal of constructing several engineered proteins, and then directly observe how they interact.

Basically, we know the genetic information about those proteins. We produce engineered proteins, by introducing engineered DNA into various kinds of cells, and letting the cells translate the DNA sequence information to the corresponding polypeptide chain. The cells can then go through the process of folding the polypeptide chains to real, functional protein with artificial functions.

To be honest, I don’t think there’s a huge applicational value of this research, at least not for now. But it’s still important to study it, just because it’s natural science, because we want to unravel how the body works. We want to know because it’s our body, right? In the future, it might find applications, though. It often happens.

The university is like a huge stage, and you can perform and be whoever you want, whatever kind of person you want. And life here provides you with various opportunities.

Personally, I’m not a very social person, but it doesn’t matter. I just want to focus on the things that I’m interested in. I just like to study, work out in the gym, stuff like that. So, frankly, my four years at university may look boring in others’ eyes, but I think it’s quite interesting because I’ve had a lot of experiences and developed a lot of skills. And I still enjoy a lot of interesting experiences by learning about the city and this country, and about the culture and how people behave — how people from various parts of the world do things differently from people in my country.