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702 labs · 51 student voices
Junji Yamaguchi, Project Professor
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The Morphology and Function II Lab studies the molecular mechanisms that allow plants to survive in diverse environments. Plants, which live rooted in place, adapt to harsh environmental changes by skillfully altering the conditions inside their cells. The lab focuses in particular on nutrient stress and pathogen stress, which have a major impact on growth and productivity, and investigates the molecular mechanisms that regulate them. Using the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana as its main material, the lab combines molecular genetics, physiological and biochemical analysis, and imaging.
Masaaki Watahiki, Associate Professor
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The Watahiki Lab clarifies the role of plant hormones in the mechanisms by which plant organs, such as roots, are formed. Plants are often thought of as the very image of immobile organisms, but when recorded footage is played at high speed, they can be seen producing new organs such as shoots and flowers one after another. This shaping process is called morphogenesis, and the plant hormone auxin plays a central role in it. Using Arabidopsis mutants and transgenic plants, the lab investigates the mechanisms of expression of auxin-responsive genes.
Hiroto Ogawa, Professor
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The Ogawa Lab studies how animals sense the outside world, decide how to act, and carry out that action. Using two cricket behaviors as models, the escape behavior triggered by air currents and the sound source localization behavior toward the male's calling song, the lab aims to give a complete account of the process, from stimulus reception through central information processing to motor control. The Fukutomi group has also begun research on how electric communication and swimming movements are coordinated in weakly electric fish. The lab's approach is built on electrophysiology and optical measurement (imaging), combined with virtual reality, treadmills, high-speed cameras, and machine-learning analysis.
Kazuhiro Wada, Professor
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The Wada Lab studies how vocal learning is shaped by both genetics and environment. Vocal learning, as in human language and birdsong, is important for communication between individuals, and individual and species differences arise under the influence of both nature (genetics) and nurture (environment). How vocal learning is controlled by neural circuits and genes in the brain, and how it develops and has evolved, remains largely unknown. The lab approaches this question at the levels of behavior, neural circuits, neurons, synapses, genes, and genomic DNA.
Masayo Soma, Professor
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The Soma Lab focuses on bird family and social relationships to study why and how the high cognitive abilities that underlie behavior evolved. The subjects are songbirds of the family Estrildidae (order Passeriformes), such as the Bengalese finch and the Java sparrow. Although birds are phylogenetically distant from humans, they have features comparable to those of humans, such as parents raising their young, living in families, and acquiring vocalizations through social learning. From the standpoint of behavioral ecology and comparative cognitive science, the lab considers the function and evolution of behavior, focusing on song, courtship, parent–offspring relationships, development, and life history.
Kazuhiro Kitada, Associate Professor
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The Kitada Lab uses laboratory animals such as mice and rats to investigate the causes of diseases of the central nervous system and the reproductive system. The lab creates genetically modified mice and rats and examines how genes involved in human diseases function. It is steady, painstaking genetics research: the researchers raise the animals themselves and repeatedly observe phenotypes and determine genotypes. In its faculty profile, the lab invites students to spend a year experiencing genetics research.
Yuichi Takeuchi, Associate Professor
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The Takeuchi Lab studies what kinds of adaptive changes occur in the brain and nervous system that govern the behavior of living organisms. The forms and behaviors of living things are diverse, and even within a single species there are different types. Right- and left-handedness in humans is one such individual variation. The lab studies African scale-eating cichlids, in which the brain circuits and genes related to handedness can be examined, and it is the only lab in the world that breeds and maintains them for experiments. It also works with many other fish species. The lab hopes that, through research, students will develop the ability to solve mysteries with their own hands.
Nobuaki Tanaka, Associate Professor
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The Tanaka Lab studies the processing of sensory information and the neuroendocrine system, using the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster and squid. How does the brain recognize the external environment and produce behavior suited to it? In Drosophila, the lab investigates how odor information is processed and how that processing is modulated by an individual's mood and physical condition. Recently, the lab has also begun studying motor control of a body without joints or a skeleton, as well as sensory information processing in the brain, using the pygmy squid, a cephalopod. In both animals, the lab combines anatomical and physiological methods to clarify the structure and function of individual neurons.
Michael Schleyer, Assistant Professor
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The Schleyer Lab is an international research team that studies learning and memory, decision-making, and movement. The brain is one of the greatest unknowns, and much remains unknown about how it controls the body and behavior. The lab therefore focuses on the brain of a small, simple invertebrate: the larva of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. It has only about 10,000 neurons, and genetic tools are available that allow neural circuits to be analyzed at the level of single cells. Through research that could be called "insect psychology," the lab approaches the question of what a small insect thinks with its simple brain.
Yoshinao Katsu, Professor
0 student voices
The Katsu Lab studies how the proteins that receive sex hormones (receptors) arose during evolution. The lab isolates receptor genes from animals at key points in animal evolution, such as cartilaginous fishes, ancient fishes, lampreys, and amphioxus, and examines their functions. It traces when and how the precise endocrine systems of higher vertebrates came into being.
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