History of Physcomitrella studies in Japan

MOSS 2004 Interesting Stories: Brief History of Physcomitrella Research in Japan (by M. Hasebe)

In the late 80’s, Prof. Toshiyuki Nagata, who was the first to successfully regenerate tobacco from a single protoplast, and known for establishing the BY-2 tobacco cell line, was interested in the physiological responses of Physcomitrella to auxin and cytokinin. He started a project on phytohormone response with an undergraduate student Kenichiro Fujiwara in the Department of Botany, University of Tokyo, and obtained the Grasden wood line of P. patens from David Cove. Fujiwara pursued graduate studies in the laboratory of Prof. Akio Toh-e, who is a well-known researcher in the field of yeast cell cycle, and branching out into plant research as a new professor in the same Department of Botany. It was at this time when Fujiwara worked on cell cycle regulation and efficient gene targeting in Physcomitrella via homologous recombination, and was in contact with David Cove, Didier Schaefer and other colleagues in Europe. From the latter, he introduced new knowledge and techniques on moss transformation and gene targeting to Japan.

Fujiwara was using a clean bench in the Koishikawa Botanical Garden (still in the University of Tokyo) to prevent contamination of yeast in Toh-e’s lab. (At that time, Prof. Nagata served as the Director of the Garden.) In the same Botanical Garden, Tomoaki Nishiyama was working on the phylogeny of Bryophytes as a Master’s degree student. Fujiwara and Nishiyama often discussed the usefulness of Physcomitrella for both physiological and evolutionary studies. Meanwhile, Mitsuyasu Hasebe was an Assistant Professor in this Botanical Garden, and when he came back in 1995 from his two-year visit in Jody Banks’ lab in Purdue University, he was interested in studying the evolution of developmental mechanisms (EvoDevo) in land plants.

When Hasebe moved his laboratory to the National Institute for Basic Biology in Okazaki as an Associate Professor in 1998, he decided to use Physcomitrella as a model for Byrophytes in his EvoDevo studies. Nishiyama and Keiko Sakakibara, both of whom were graduate students in the University of Tokyo, joined Hasebe’s new lab as Ph.D. students. Now, more than 10 laboratories in Japan use Physcomitrella as a material in various fields of science.