Our main research topic is to decipher the mechanism how cells differentiate into diverse shapes and functions in multicellular organisms. All the plant and animal individuals originate from a single fertilized egg (zygote), but the cells origiated from it acquire different fates. The fundamental tool for this cell differentiation process is the cell type-specifi gene expression. All the cells in a multicellular organism in different share the same genome, but the expression (transcription and translation) of different set of the genome leads each cell to a specific shape and function. The first research topic in our lab is to study the regulatory mechanism of cell type-specific gene expression.
