Recognizing Plant Physiology authors: Yuta Kikuchi

Yuta Kikuchi, first author of Chloroplast autophagy and ubiquitination combine to manage oxidative damage and starvation responses

Current Position: a company employee

Education: MSc in Life Science, Tohoku University, Japan

Non-scientific Interests: cooking, traveling, playing golf

Brief bio: I joined the research group of Dr. Masanori Izumi when I went to graduate school at Tohoku University. That was my first chance to use plants as research materials because I was an undergraduate student in the faculty of engineering. Although it was not easy for me to grow healthy plants in the beginning, my colleague, Dr. Sakuya Nakamura, helped me to progress many experiments on plant phenotyping, microscopy observations, and biochemistry. Thus, I was able to find the parallel functions of autophagy and some types of ubiquitination system in chloroplast degradation. I really enjoyed the days of research in graduate school.