Recognizing Plant Cell authors: Sachie Kimura

Sachie Kimura, first author of CRK2 and C-terminal Phosphorylation of NADPH Oxidase RBOHD Regulate Reactive Oxygen Species Production in Arabidopsis

Current Position: Assistant Professor, Ritsumeikan Global Innovation Research Organization (R-GIRO), Ritsumeikan University, Japan

Education: Ph.D. in Applied Biological Science from Tokyo University of Science, Japan

Non-scientific Interests: reading, art appreciation, aquariums, traveling

Brief bio: I first encountered the respiratory burst oxidase homologs (RBOHs), ROS-producing enzyme when I was a master student in Prof. Kazuyuki Kuchitsu’s lab at Tokyo University of Science. I did my PhD work on the regulatory mechanisms for activation of RBOH by using animal cell culture, and Dr. Hidetaka Kaya, an assistant Prof. in the Kuchitsu lab at that time, made me more interested in a science career. After a brief stay at the University of Tuebingen, Germany, as lecturer and postdoc and also enjoying good beers in the lab of Prof. Klaus Harter, I pursued my next postdoc opportunity to study ROS signaling in plants. And then in 2014, I encountered the cysteine-rich receptor-like kinases (CRKs) and Dr. Michael Wrzaczek, who has been a great mentor for science and also aquariums for me, at the University of Helsinki in Finland. The combination of our expertise on RBOHs and CRKs, and with strong support from co-authors of this paper, led us to identify CRK2 as an important regulator of RBOHD in Arabidopsis. Moving back Japan in 2019, I am working to understand the function of ROS in the mineral deficiency in Arabidopsis in the lab of associate Prof. Yoichiro Fukao lab at Ritsumeikan University. In the future, I would like to contribute to further developing our understanding of ROS signaling in plants.