Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, The University of Tokyo Department of
Integrated Biosciences

Occupying about 70% of the total surface area of the earth, the oceans represent the largest aquatic habitat and have served as a cradle of evolution during the past 3 billion years. This research group uses advanced technology and approaches to explore the life in the ocean from the perspective of evolution, ecology and material cycles. Our research goals are to elucidate adaptive and survival strategies of marine organisms and to investigate key processes involved in the maintenance and regulation of marine

Phytoplankton is primary producer in marine ecosystem fixed 50 giga ton carbon per year. Zooplankton transports primary production to higher trophic levels and supports 90 million tons of world fisheries production. We are studying phytoplankton and zooplankton to understand the genetic, physiological and ecological characteristics and the role on food web dynamics and global biogeochemical cycles. Our studies are based on both field studies using coastal stations and research vessels and also laboratory studies including incubation experiment and various genetic and chemical analyses. Our study fields are from coastal water around Japan to Arctic and Tropical oceans.

Microbes including bacteria, protists and viruses play important roles in the regulation of material cycling in marine environments. Marine microbes are the key to understand current and emerging issues in our society such as sustainability of natural environments, global change of climate and human health. They are also expected to be novel gene resources. Since most of them have never been cultured, many challenging scientific issues remain to be unexplored. For example, marine bacteria actively utilize dissolved organic matter which is a huge carbon pool comparable to the atmospheric CO2, however we have little knowledge on the chemistry and dynamics of marine dissolved organic matter and its interaction with bacteria. Fundamental questions are: What kinds of microbes are living in the ocean? How are they working? How marine ecosystems are working together with microbes and changing in the future? We investigate the diversity and function of marine microbes as well as structure and function of marine microbial food webs and organic matter-microbe interactions in order to contribute to a better understanding of the controls of marine ecosystems.