Plant cells harbor beautiful Golgi apparatus, which individually forms a stacked structure in the cytoplasm. It is an ideal system to study why and how such stacked structures of the Golgi are formed and maintained. We have elucidated that plant Golgi is almost always lying in the vicinity of the ER exit sites and the cis-most compartment of the Golgi plays a special role to receive cargo, which we named GECCO (Golgi entry core compartment) (Ito et al., J. Cell Sci. 131:jcs203893).

We are also studying how proteins are sorted in the trans-Golgi network (an organelle independent of the Golgi) for several distinct routes from the viewpoint of transport carriers such as adaptor complexes.