University of Shiga Prefecture
School of Environmental Science
Dep't. of Biological Resources Management

Lab. of Plant Genetics & Breeding
since 2006

Akifumi Shimizu


Associate Prof.
Mail
->Japanese



Research

Now my research is involved in three topics:

First, we are isolating the genes for tolerance to Phosphorus deficiency in rice. Phosphorus deficiency is a main production limiting factor especially in tropic and sub-tropic regions where soil-amelioration is not an economically feasible remedy. @We wish to improve rice's Phosphorus utilization for overcoming this adverse soil. Efficient utilization of phosphorus fertilizer is a prerequisite for low-input sustainable agriculture and/or environmental conservation type agriculture.

The secondly, genetic analysis of low-pH and/or flooding tolerance in rice has been conducted. Rice is not only a model organism whose genome has been sequenced, but also an adapted plant to wetland. Since this adaptation may be associated with the tolerance to acidity, we are surveying these genetic factors.

Finally, we are developing an integrative tool for transcriptome and metabolome data by using a correspondence analysis (CA). CA is an exploratory analysis which can reduce the dimensionality of the data without essential loss of information like principle component analysis (PCA). Since data profiles (patterns of relative frequencies) are analyzed in CA unlike PCA, CA has an advantage in plotting genes or metabolites with similarities of profiles. We are now preparing a user-friendly software.

Key word

Genetics and Plant breeding, Nutritional Disorder, Stress tolerance, Marker assisted analysis, Map-based cloning, Multivariate analysis, Gene Expression Analysis

Publications

Projects



Japanese