Seeking Undiscovered Laws and Possibilities

The Biology’s Frontier is Greatly Expanding

Biologists have traditionally researched specific subjects, predominantly on so-called “model organisms,” and established the field of modern biology. These model organisms have excellent features and characteristics for research, which simultaneously mean that they are also “atypical” organisms. Biologists have called for expanding analyses to a broader spectrum of organisms; to reflect nature better. Through the evolution of approximately four billion years, numerous organisms have appeared, adapted to environments, interacted with each other, and established complex ecosystems. There must be numerous still unknown life phenomena and laws, some of which we may be able to adapt to solve problems humans are facing now.

Recently, measurement and information technologies have progressed dramatically in biology. They now allow us to analyze previously inaccessible organisms and life phenomena. In other words, this advancement has rapidly enabled researchers and graduate students to pursue broader research subjects on life phenomena. The field of biology is quickly changing its shape.

In our laboratory, we seek to uncover undiscovered laws and possibilities in biology amid these drastic changes in the field of biology. We are conducting a variety of research to answer the following five fundamental questions:

1. Evolution of Genomes and Life Systems
 How have the elaborate and complex life systems evolved?

2. Ecosystem and Living Strategies
 How are the ecosystems stably maintained?

3. Unknown Function Genes
 What unknown gene functions have evolved in four billion years?

4. Multidimensional Omics
 What is the methodology to reveal unknown gene functions from big data?

5. Gene Birth
 How many genes are being born on the earth?

The following are the research keywords related to our research:
 -Bioinformatics (especially, evolutionary and ecological informatics)
 -Evolutionary biology (especially, evolution of genomes and life systems)
 -Microbial ecology, microbial genomics, and environmental DNA (especially, microbial dark matter, non-model organisms, metagenomics, and databases)

I was originally trained as a structural biologist as a student of the Department of Biophysics and Biochemistry at the Graduate School of Science, the University of Tokyo. I then majored in bioinformatics at the Department of Computational Biology at the Graduate School of Frontier Sciences. After I obtained my Ph.D., I joined the Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute of the University of Tokyo, where I gained an appreciation for macro-scale biology. In our laboratory, we are aiming to cultivate a new area of biology by combining different approaches, namely, bioinformatics, laboratory experiments, mathematics, and field samplings.