Sixty years of research on photosynthesis: a personal scientific autobiography

The following scientific autobiography is presented here as a homage to Professor Kazuo Shibata, who is the one who led me to do research in photosynthesis. He had invited me to Riken (The Institute of Physical and Chemical Research), and had launched the Japan-US Collaboration Project on "The Solar Energy Conversion by Means of Photosynthesis" and had invited many international scientists to Riken. My research, under Shibata, started on using a sensitive method for the determination of chlorophyll b, and of SDS-PAGE for the pigment protein complexes of the two photosystems. After Shibata had passed away at the age of 66, I found post-illumination CO₂ burst from cyanobacterial cell suspensions. This finding led me to study the CO₂-concentrating mechanism (CCM) and the function and structure of NADP(H) dehydrogenase complexes (NDH-I) in cyanobacteria, which were developed after I had moved to Nagoya University, and in several other laboratories in the world after I had retired from Nagoya University.