To understand how plants produce complex shapes such as flowers and roots, I am investigating what happens in plant cells and how they lead to the formation of the entire plant. Specifically, I am focusing on zygotes, visualizing intracellular dynamics by high-resolution live imaging and analyzing various gene functions.

I focused on the plant zygotes because I have loved flowers and plants since childhood, and I wished to understand the principles underlying complicated mechanisms. When flowers are pollinated, zygotes are formed by fusing the sperm cells from father's pollen and the egg cells produced in mother's pistil. The zygote is a single cell and undergoes a series of cell divisions to become a new plant. This means that the zygote is the whole plant at the beginning of development. Therefore, I thought that we could understand the mechanism of plant formation by studying how the zygote gradually forms a plant through cell division.

I am looking for an answer to the question, "How does a single cell make a plant?" Even such a simple question is difficult to solve. Not only in biology, but the world is filled with mysteries. Perhaps because we learn "what have already been clarified" in school classes, some people ask for "the answer" or "the path that will not fail" even in research at universities. But there is no such thing. Research is an attempt to figure out, in one's own way, what no one else in the world knows yet, so I think that people who can patiently enjoy that are suited to science.