People & Ideas
Gohta Goshima: Questing for answers on the mitotic spindle
Goshima studies spindle assembly and microtubule dynamics.
students go on to graduate school, often
staying in the same laboratory where they
do their undergraduate research. So I entered Mitsuhiro Yanagida’s laboratory as
an undergrad and studied how kinetochores affect spindle morphology via theirinteractions with microtubules.
I very much liked doing experiments,
and I was good at getting data. I publishedseveral papers during my graduate work.
But psychologically this was a difficult
time for me because Yanagida-san, like myparents, felt that I lacked creative vision.
I thought I would probably have to quit
science before becoming a researcher, but
I decided that, if this was so, then I should
work my hardest and accomplish as muchas I could before I had to quit.
Then the American professor Andrew
A QUESTION OF STYLE
Murray visited our lab, and I took a
Did you grow up in Japan?
three-hour train trip with him to a JapaYes, I was born in Osaka. My interests grow- nese conference. We started talking about
ing up were pretty typical for a Japanese science, and he said scientists do reboy: I liked to play baseball,search in order to undersoccer, and shogi (Japanesestand something that is not“This waschess). I really didn’t likeunderstood. This was ascience at all, and my father
revelation for me, becausea revelationand mother discouraged me
this was exactly my style.
for me,from being a scientist because
I may not have any grandbecause this philosophy, but I am pretty
they felt that I did not haveenough creativity. I think mygood at solving the probwas exactly
mother also felt that sciencelem in front of me. Evenmy style.”
was not a very good occupasmall questions can betion because she always had
worth addressing. But I still
to watch my father, who was a researcher in was not convinced that I should stay in
cardiac biology, working so much harder science until I was maybe 30 years old.
and longer than office workers. So I nearly
chose to take the nonscience track in high MAKING A COMMITMENT
school, but I realized that once one is on the What eventually convinced you to stay
nonscience track one cannot later switch to in a research career?
science easily, whereas the reverse is not I was quite successful in terms of my pubtrue. If I struggled in science I could always lication record and enjoyed doing reswitch to a nonscience discipline. That is the search, so I thought, why not do a postmain reason why I decided, at the last min- doc? My postdoc interviews were only on
the west coast of America. I looked at Sanute, to do a biology major at university.
Diego, San Francisco, and Seattle for avery simple reason: all have major leagueYou liked biology well enough tobaseball teams and a lot of good Asiancontinue with a PhD…
In the Japanese system, real research restaurants. [Laughs] I joined Ron Vale’sstarts in the last year of college, and most lab in San Francisco.
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JCB • VOLUME 206 • NUMBER 2 • 2014

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE MOLECULAR BIOLOGY SOCIETY OF JAPANT

he successful execution of cell division requires the coordinatedand concerted activity of myriad
genes—so many, in fact, that new players
are still being identified, and the roles ofmany are still unknown.
Seeing a question that needed answering, Gohta Goshima jumped into thesearch for mitosis-associated genes as a
postdoc (1, 2) and has characterized several new genes involved in spindle assembly (3) and microtubule dynamics (4).
Goshima has since expanded his search
into new territories, seeking to understandhow different organisms solve the problem of mitotic spindle assembly (5), as hetold us when we reached him at his officeat Nagoya University in Japan.

Gohta Goshima

When I got to Ron’s lab, I had theidea to investigate the roles of different
motor proteins in mitosis using RNAi,
which at that time was a newly developed technique. My friends all thought
this was a boring approach, but I knew
I could do it quickly. So I did it anyway
and observed some unexpected phenotypes in that screen. I thought Ron would
think this was a boring paper andwouldn’t be interested in publishing it,
but he was actually quite enthusiastic
about it. This became my most frequently
cited paper.
After that, I returned to my main project, which concerned organelle transport
in neurons. For two years I was unsuccessful with this, whereas my side projecton the mitotic spindle was going very
well and generating a lot of data. Clearly
I should focus on the spindle! [Laughs]
But I was worried that most of the bigquestions in the mitosis field had alreadybeen answered or were about to be solved.
Then in the summer of the third year of
my postdoc I went to Woods Hole andmentioned my concern to Ted Salmon,
who had been in the mitosis field for 30years. He said he thought the very samething back when he was a student! Hesaid, “Don’t worry, Gohta. Just pursue
what you are interested in.”

Text and Interview by Caitlin Sedwick
csedwick@gmail.com

Spindles under study in the Goshima lab.
Labeling: microtubules, green; DNA, blue;!-tubulin, magenta.

So that’s when you committed to
studying the spindle?
Right. After talking with Ron, I decided
to do a genome-wide RNAi screen forgenes involved in mitotic spindle formation in fly S2 cells. Again, this may not
be a very creative approach. What I did
was simply mixing cells with 14,425 different RNAs and observing 3,950,818
spindles. But as my parents foresaw, I
am good at doing this type of routine
work. [Laughs] After about six months
I had several interesting genes to follow
up on, and then I got a group leader position at Nagoya University.
In our screen we had found several
genes that gave rise to the same phenotype. So I took those genes and did aquick experiment to look at where those
proteins are and whether they interact
with each other. We found that they
formed a stable, eight-subunit complex,
which we named augmin, that is important for microtubule amplification andorganization of the mitotic spindle. We
showed—first in fly S2 cells but laterand more vividly in plant cells—thatcentrosomes can largely compensate fora lack of augmin but that cells lacking
both augmin and centrosomes have very
defective spindles. In plants the centrosome was lost during evolution, so when
we knocked down augmin the spindle
was completely defective. We’re now
looking at augmin in filamentous fungi,
where it seems to play a somewhat different role.

took quite a while, but eventually I wasAnother interesting gene in your screen able to combine this with live imaging towas Sentin…
do some gene hunting studies. My first
Disruption of Sentin gives rise to a short focus was on kinesin motors because
spindle phenotype that is similar to that of plants have unusually high numbers ofcells lacking the microtubule polymerase kinesins. We think plants use many ofXMAP215. Then we saw that, like the mi- these motors during spindle organization
crotubule-associated protein EB1, GFP- to compensate for the absence of centrotagged Sentin localizes to the plus ends of somes and of cytoplasmic dynein.
microtubules. We found that Sentin directly binds to EB1 at plus ends and helps What advice do you give to students whorecruit XMAP215 to facilitate microtubule are interested in a career in science?
polymerization. Sentin also has a role in Many Japanese students quit graduate
inducing microtubule catastrophe.
school after getting a master’s degree. I
One of the key words in my lab is “re- encourage all my graduate students to getconstitution.” We would like to reconsti- a PhD because the heart of a PhD is to pubtute the dynamics of the microtubule plus lish a research paper and having a paper as
end in vitro using a bottoma first author is a great thing.
up approach. Tubulin has
It will be yours forever, even
“Anothersome dynamic behavior
after you die. It is such a
without any other proteins
key word
wonderful feeling.
as long as there is GTP,
Afterwards, it’s theirin my lab isbut that behavior is quite
choice whether they go to‘diversity.’”different from the in vivo
industry or continue as adynamics. Adding Sentin,postdoc. But if they decideEB1, and XMAP125 can produce, to to do a postdoc, I advise them, based onsome extent, similar behaviors to what my own experience, that they should
we see in vivo, but we don’t see all the decide within three years whether to go tocharacteristic features yet. We must be academia or take another path.
missing some proteins.
1. Goshima, G., and R.D. Vale. 2003. J. Cell Biol.
162:1003–1016.

How did you come to start working
2. Goshima, G., et al. 2007. Science. 316:417–421.
with plants?
3. Goshima, G., et al. 2008. J. Cell Biol. 181:421–429.
Another key word in my lab is “diversity.”
4. Li, W., et al. 2012. J. Cell Biol. 199:849–862.
When I was in high school I contemplated
5. Miki, T., et al. 2014. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA.
studying agricultural science at university,111:E1053–E1061.
so I have a long-standing interest in plantbiology. As a group leader I
was finally free to choose myown projects, and I decided tostart working with plants. I
wanted to do RNAi screens inplants similar to the ones I
had already done in fly cells,
and the moss Physcomitrella
patens was a very attractivemodel system because a draft
genome was available andRNAi was already establishedin this plant. I wanted to develop a conditional RNAi
system in P. patens, and that Goshima lab members under cherry blossoms.
People & Ideas • THE JOURNAL OF CELL BIOLOGYPHOTO COURTESY OF TOMOKO NISHIYAMAIMAGES COURTESY OF GOHTA GOSHIMA (TOP LEFT
AND BOTTOM LEFT); YUKI NAKAOKA (TOP RIGHT); AND
TOMOYA EDZUKA (BOTTOM RIGHT)

KEY WORDS149