Genetics

Biography

Kenji Ikehara graduated from the Department of Industrial Chemistry, Faculty of Engineering, Kyoto University in 1968. He received his B. Eng. (1968) and subsequently earned M. Eng. (1970) and D. Eng. (1976) degrees from Kyoto University. He began his career as a research associate in the Faculty of Science at the University of Tokyo before moving on to become an associate professor in the Faculty of Science at Nara Women's University. He was later promoted to professor and subsequently served as the dean of the Faculty of Science at Nara Women's University. Additionally, he held the position of director at the Nara Study Center of the Open University of Japan. For approximately 15 years, he focused his research on sporulation initiation of Bacillus subtilis. Later, he shifted his focus to the origins and evolutionary processes of microbial genes, the genetic code, proteins, and life. He has proposed several hypotheses, including the GC-NSF(a) hypothesis on the origin of genes, the GNC-SNS hypothesis on the genetic code, the protein 0th-order structure hypothesis on the origin of proteins, and the [GADV]-protein world hypothesis (GADV hypothesis) on the origin of life. Furthermore, he served as the local chair of the International Conference, Origin 2014, held in Nara in 2014.