Brightly colored pigmentation in lower vertebrates: wonder searching its mechanisms and significance in the context of phylogeny.

This is a biographical sketch of my research and its related personal episodes with respect to brightly colored pigmentation in lower vertebrates. It includes a brief story of the studies on; (a) pterinosomes as a specific site of pteridine deposition in xanthophores or erythrophores of fish and amphibians, (b) a mosaic phenotype of chromatophores occurring in the reptiles and its implication for their developmental origin and differentiation mechanisms, (c) erythrophoroma as a tumor of erythrophores in goldfish, (d) the pluripotentials of erythrophoroma cells for expression of neural crest-derived characters in vitro, (e) pigment disorders occurring in hatchery-raised flounders and (f) recognition of pigment cell types by murine tyrosinase genes transfected into an orange-colored variant of medaka fish. Some of the personal affairs associated with the history of the Japanese community for pigment cell research were described to illustrate the background of these studies.