Interview with Kazuo Shinozaki.

Kazuo Shinozaki studied biology as an undergraduate at Osaka University (BSc 1972), and then molecular biology at Nagoya University. His PhD was on the topic of ‘Discontinuous DNA replication of T7 bacteriophage’. He was appointed Research Associate at the National Institute of Genetics in 1978, and started to analyze chloroplast genes and their expression. He became Assistant Professor of the Department of Biology at Nagoya University in 1983, was promoted to Associate Professor, Center for Gene Research, Nagoya University, and in 1986 determined the complete nucleotide sequence of the tobacco chloroplast genome. From 1987 to 1989 he studied plant transgenic technology at Rockefeller University, New York. In 1989 he was appointed Chief Scientist of the Plant Molecular Biology Laboratory, RIKEN Tsukuba Life Science Center, to start studies into the molecular biology of plant abiotic stress response using Arabidopsis as a model system. He and his wife Kazuko Yamaguchi-Shinozaki discovered many important genes involved in plant responses to drought, cold, and heat, and analyzed gene expression and signal transduction in stress responses. In 1999 he initiated Arabidopsis functional genomics at the RIKEN Genomic Sciences Center (GSC). His group collected fulllength cDNAs, transposon-tagged mutants, and cDNAoverexpressing lines, and analyzed the stress response transcriptome. These genomic resources and information are available from RIKEN Bio Resource Center (BRC; . In 2005 he was appointed Director of the RIKEN Plant Science Center (PSC) to lead plant functional genomics. Since 2013 he has been Director of the RIKEN Center for Sustainable Resource Science (CSRS; to lead new interdisciplinary research projects between biology and chemistry to contribute to sustainable production of biomass, foods, materials, and energy. His main research areas are molecular biology and functional genomics of plant environmental stress responses and tolerance, and chloroplast functions in stress responses. He has been on the Thomson Reuter’s list of highly cited researchers in the category of Plant and Animal Science since 2007, and in 2011 was selected ‘Hottest Researcher’ (most cited) by Thomson Reuters.