How did life emerge from matter? Microorganisms may hold an important key to answering this question.
Modern life possesses sophisticated functions such as self-replication. Yet before life emerged, only simple chemical substances existed on Earth.
How nonliving matter transitioned into living systems remains one of the greatest mysteries in the life sciences.
My research has focused on the opposite transition—how bacteria die, or in other words, how living systems become nonliving.
Through this work, I discovered the existence of an ambiguous state in which bacteria cannot be clearly categorized as either living or dead.
This finding led me to a new question: by studying microorganisms in such boundary states, might we gain insight into how life merged from nonliving matter?
My research will seek to address this fundamental question by investigating microorganisms that exist at the boundary between life and nonlife.