Innovative Plant Biotechnology
Contributing to sustainable food and biomass production through development of plant trait improvement techniques
With global warming, climate change, and population increase, sustainable food supply and procurement is now a global issue. CSRS has been using model plants to explore and elucidate the functions of beneficial genes and promoting research for translating the results in actual crops. Based on these research results, the Innovative Plant Biotechnology project aims to develop plants with high qualitative and quantitative value added with resistance to environmental stress and diseases.
In addition, the project will use omics analysis to explore peptides and other regulators and employ chemical biology approaches to elucidate main factors leading to improvement of productivity and functionality of foods and biomass. To ensure transfer of the results in the field to the actual farmland under varying conditions, the project will also use information science to store and analyze data from multiple angles for trait improvement.
Vice Project Leader
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Motoaki Seki
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Keiichi Mochida
While stable food procurement is becoming an issue, speedy genome decoding and analysis and advances in information science and technology have enabled accurate exploration of genetic information. As such a trend significantly increases the prospect for development of innovative technology, growing expectations are being placed on scientists.
At the moment, we are carrying out joint research on production with research institutes in Southeast Asia and other regions. While deepening collaboration with these specialist organizations in and outside of Japan, we would like to positively utilize our research results on genomic information we have accumulated and trait improvement techniques to return to society.