Kunio Yamazaki

Dr. Kunio Yamazaki was a biologist who worked at the Monell Chemical Senses Center from 1980 until his death.

Dr. Yamazaki is most notable for his extensive work with the major histocompatibility complex.

Born and raised in Japan, Kunio Yamazaki received his PhD from the University of Tokyo in 1970. He was a senior researcher at the Tokyo Metropolitan Isotope Research Center before coming, in the mid 1970s, to the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research for post-doctoral training in the laboratories of the famous President of Sloan Kettering, Lewis Thomas, and the eminent immunogeneticist Edward Boyse. It was here that Kunio and his colleagues Boyse, Thomas and Judith Bard, made the seminal discoveries that the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) genes, best known for their role in immune regulation, also were responsible for provisioning an animal with a unique olfactory signature, called the MHC odortype.^[1]

The first publication to describe this finding (Yamazaki et al., 1976, J. Exp. Medicine) demonstrated that mice tend to mate with other mice that are different from themselves at the MHC loci.^[2] This discovery, which has been replicated in a number of other species by other investigators, provides a basis for maintenance of MHC diversity within a species and likely plays a central role in inbreeding avoidance. Thus the work has had implications for evolutionary biology, sociobiology and immunology. Following this paper, Kunio and collaborators, who now included Gary Beauchamp at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, proved that urinary odors could mediate discrimination between mice of different MHC types.^[3][4]

References