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Imagine living in an extreme environment with pressure greater than 1,000 atm., temperatures higher than 100 'C, and very little oxygen content, in a completely dark world where sunshine never penetrates.
Human beings are forced to use their imagination to conceive of such conditions, although many microorganisms, and even fish and shellfish, thrive in such extreme environments in the deep sea and deep subsurfaces of the earth.

In our Research Center, we are studying microorganisms and higher organisms that live in extreme conditions to determine:
1) what types of organisms live there; 2) their characteristic properties; 3) their relations with marine-earth environments; and 4) how they may contribute to our daily lives and/or find industrial applications. Our scientific goal is to extend our understanding of the origins of life, marine ecosystem and the adaptation mechanisms of organisms to extreme environments.
Another goal is to establish new fields in biotechnology through the discovery of novel microbes and enzymes, their genome analysis, and finding industrial applications for the knowledge obtained through such study.