"Sense", such as vision, audition, touch, gustation, and olfaction, is the sole "window" opening toward the outside of our bodies: it is an important function for living organisms to receive, transduce, integrate, recognize, and process a wide array of information from environment. In this research team, we focus on the first step of sensing, through signal reception from environment to signal transduction and transfer in a cell. We aim to elucidate molecular mechanisms of this process by knowing structures of involving proteins. The pivot of our study is structural analyses of sensor proteins, signaling proteins, and ion channels by X-ray crystallography using SPring-8 beamlines. We also carry out functional analyses of these proteins with biochemical and physiological approaches. The object of this team is to understand the sensing mechanisms by integrating the structural and functional information.