Our brains can remember positive and negative experiences by associating them with stimuli such as colors and smells. We are studying neural mechanisms of “associative learning” using fruit flies Drosophila melanogaster which offer convenient and advanced genetic manipulations. Since all animals evolved from the same common ancestor, there should be common rules for the life phenomena. Principles in the simple fly brain can inspire the universal mechanisms including the complex human brain. Furthermore, we are studying jellyfish in order to explore the evolutionary “origin of the nervous system”.

When I was appointed to Tohoku University, I was looking for a new challenge and then came across the jellyfish Cladonema pacificum. Jellyfish is considered as one of the earliest animals to acquire nervous systems during evolution. Although jellyfish have only diffuse nerve nets without ganglia, they display diverse behaviors with extraordinary precision. ‘How such a simple nervous system can produce such complex behavior!’ I was fascinated.
Recently, we discovered the neural mechanism that regulates appetite in the jellyfish, and the molecular signals are conserved in more derived animals with developed brains, such as flies. The research quest of tracing back to the origin of complex traits is timeless since Darwin's period.

Do you care not to stand out? People request our research to “be original”, meaning to make difference and to “become an origin”.