Associate Director, Cytogenetics and Molecular Pathology
Assistant Professor of Pathology & Immunology
Yoshiko Mito, MD, is an assistant professor in the Department of Pathology and Immunology and an associate director of Cytogenetics and Molecular Pathology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. She has trained at Harvard Medical School, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and the University of Tokyo. She is a clinical cytogeneticist certified by the American Board of Medical Genetics and Genomics and holds a New York State Certificate of Qualification in Cytogenetics and Oncology.
As an associate director, Mito shares a management responsibility for the Cytogenetics and Molecular Pathology lLboratory, a CLIA-certified and CAP-accredited state-of-art clinical diagnostic laboratory. The laboratory offers comprehensive cytogenetic testing including conventional chromosome analysis (karyotyping), high-resolution chromosomal microarray analysis, and Fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH), and accepts a wide variety of specimen types including amniotic fluid, chorionic villus, cord blood, products of conception, peripheral blood, bone marrow, and formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded (FFPE) tissues. She is responsible for interpretation and reporting of these clinical cases as well as providing consultation to ordering physicians from various medical specialties.
Mito is committed to genetics education, and has given a number of invited lectures on genomic medicine to fellows, residents and students from various medical specialties. She also contributes to the continuing education of the regional clinicians through symposium lectures, discussing the updates in genomic medicine. With an ever-growing list of genomic tests and often complicated interpretation of their results, she believes that education and outreach to trainees and clinicians, and even to patients, is becoming a critical role of medical geneticists for effectively genomic medicine for better patient care.
Mito has extensive background in basic science research in the fields of genomics and epigenomics. Her past and current research topics include: chromosome segregation, genome-wide profiling of histone replacement patterns and dynamics of chromatin structure, epigenetic regulation of transcription and cellular memory, allele-specific mapping of chromatin regulators, and epigenetic regulation in cancer progression and resistance to gene targeting therapy. Through these research, Mito has become an expert of genomic analysis using various types of microarrays and next generation sequencing (publications include first-author articles featured in Nature Genetics and Science). More recently, she has been conducting several clinical research projects to decipher novel phenotype-genotype correlations in prenatal and pediatric genetic conditions, and to analyze and compare clinical efficacies of several genetic testing methods in order to establish the testing strategy recommendation.