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Nagata Lab (Team N / Molecular Recognition Chemistry)
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The lab explores the mechanisms that determine what insects choose to eat.
AboutAbout the lab
Why insects flourished: the power to eat
The Nagata Lab (Team N) studies the mechanisms underlying instinctive feeding behavior in insects.
When insects moved onto land, becoming able to eat new resources such as plants was a turning point that led to their explosive diversification.
The lab investigates what insects eat and how they eat it from multiple perspectives: evolution, neurobiology, metabolism, and the components contained in their food.
Mainly using the two-spotted cricket (Gryllus bimaculatus), the lab works on topics such as how hormones regulate the motivation to eat.
Key terms
- Feeding behavior
- The series of behaviors by which an animal searches for, selects, and eats food
- Hormone
- A substance produced in the body and carried by the blood and other routes to regulate the functions of distant sites
- Sterol
- A group of substances related to cholesterol. Sterols serve as building material for cells and as precursors of hormones
NewsLab news
Review article accepted by Current Opinion in Insect Science
Paper on honeybee sterols, a collaboration with the Faculty of Science, accepted
Lab paper accepted by Communications Biology
A student won the Doctoral Dissertation Encouragement Award
ResearchResearch themes
The lab aims to uncover how insects decide what to eat and how they eat it, across multiple levels: evolution, the nervous system, metabolism, and the components of food. It seeks to understand how feeding behavior has evolved and diversified.
*Illustrative imageMechanisms that determine what to eat
The lab studies the mechanisms of feeding motivation that lead insects to instinctively decide what they want to eat. It examines how hormones regulate feeding behavior and how insects select their food.
*Illustrative imagePlant-eating insects and animal-eating insects
What distinguishes a tendency to eat plants from a tendency to eat other animals? The lab explores what is happening when diet changes during an insect's growth or differs between species.
*Illustrative imageDependence on food for sterols
Insects cannot synthesize sterols such as cholesterol themselves and must take them in from their food. The lab investigates how plant-eating insects convert plant sterols in their bodies for their own use.
*Illustrative imageMechanisms that regulate molting
Molting is also one of the instinctive behaviors of insects, and it involves a series of hormones. In crickets, the lab found that ion transport peptide (ITP) is involved in regulating the fluid between the old and new cuticles during molting.
MembersFaculty
The Nagata Lab consists of faculty members, secretaries, and doctoral and master's students.As of 2026
- ProfessorShinji NagataPublications ↗
- Assistant ProfessorHitomi Seike
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Report an errorAbout the images
The top and research theme images are illustrative and were not taken at the lab. They are cropped from Wikimedia Commons images. Cropped CC BY-SA images are provided under the same CC BY-SA license as the original (version shown on each line).
- Top image: “Zweifleckgrille Gryllus bimaculatus 1” Holger Krisp / CC BY 3.0 (cropped)
- Mechanisms that determine what to eat: “Da Lat - Silkworms eating mulberry leaves” P. Hughes / CC BY 4.0 (cropped)
- Plant-eating insects and animal-eating insects: “The mantis which eats a Bee20080829” 池田正樹 (Masaki Ikeda) / Public domain (cropped)
- Dependence on food for sterols: “Tobacco Hornworm 1” Daniel Schwen / CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped)
- Mechanisms that regulate molting: “Gryllus bimaculatus (Ecdysis)” Philipp Weigell / CC BY 3.0 (cropped)
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