Current Position: Postdoctoral researcher, Division of Applied Biosciences, Graduate School of Agriculture, Kyoto University, Japan
Education: PhD: Division of Applied Biosciences, Graduate School of Agriculture, Kyoto University, Japan
Non-scientific Interests: Gardening, reading, and watching movies.
When I was an elementary school student, my father presented me with a microscope. It was a cheap plastic set for kids, but I became fascinated with the small world under the microscope. This experience became my starting point for researching microorganisms. When I entered a Master’s Program in Plant Pathology at Kyoto University, I started research on the infection system of fungal plant pathogens with Dr. Yoshitaka Takano. In particular, I focused on the roles of peroxisomal metabolism in pathogenicity of Colletotrichum orbiculare, the causal agent of cucumber anthracnose. During my Ph.D. program, I extended my interests to autophagy in fungal pathogens, and, in parallel, our group identified ATG26 as a gene involved in pathogenicity of C. orbiculare. Surprisingly, at that time, Dr. Yasuyoshi Sakai, who was working in the same building, discovered that ATG26 is a critical factor in selective autophagy of peroxisomes (pexophagy) in yeast. Thus, we began our current collaborative research project. In this study, we showed the requirement of pexophagy for host invasion by C. orbiculare. I am now very interested in how this fungal pathogen regulates organelle homeostasis to establish host infection.