Prof. Longzhu Cui
Department of Infection and Immunity
Island Scallops Ltd.
Greece
Biography
Dr. Cui received his Ph.D. in Infectious Disease from The Fourth Military Medical University, Xi’an, China, followed by two-year postdoctoral fellowship at WHO Collaborating Center for Virus Reference and Research on Hemorrhagic Fever with Renal syndrome (Asan medical center, Seoul, Korea), and came to Japan in 1997. Prior to his arrival at Jichi Medical University, Dr. Cui had served as Associate Professor at Faculty of Medicine, Juntendo University, and Vice Director at Research Center for Infections and Antimicrobials, Kitasato Institute for Life Science, Kitasato University. Following early work on the pathogenesis of hantavirus infectious disease and development of vaccine, Dr. Cui moved on to studies on Staphylococci and Staphylococcal infectious diseases. His most favorite achievements in the recent work are the clarification of molecular mechanism of vancomycin-resistance in vancomycin-resistant S. aureus (VISA), and finding of a large-scale chromosome flip-flop inversion (highly frequent reversible inversion) responsible for the bacterial phenotype switching. The phenotype switching through the genome flip-flop inversion is explained as an ingenious strategy of bacteria to survive in the adverse environments.
Research Interest
The pathogenicity and antibiotic resistance of Staphylococcus aureus.
