In 1988, Kenneth J. Kemphues and his colleagues identified par (partitioning defective) genes that are involved in cell-fate specification in Caenorhabditis elegans.
[9] His supervisor, Kazutomo Imabori, led Yoshinori Ohsumi, the 2016 Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine, in the same lab.
[10][11][12] From 1983 to 1991, he was a research associate under Koichi Suzuki at Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Medical Science to investigate Calpain[13] and PKC.
[9] In 1991, Ohno became Professor and Chair of the Department of Molecular Biology at Yokohama City University School of Medicine,[9] and led several medical students and junior researchers, as well as actively advanced collaborative researches with physician scientists.
[9] In 2017, after becoming Professor Emeritus, Ohno served as President of the Consortium of Biological Sciences (ConBio 2017) in Kobe, Japan, which was also the 26th international conference of the Federation of National Societies of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in the Asian and Oceanian Region (FAOBMB).