Ryushiro Kasahara (Visiting Scientist, Bioscience and Biotechnology Center, Nagoya University)

Challenging to establish the rice apomixis system by analyzing and manipulating rice reproductive molecules

 Rice has long been the Japanese principal food but even now, apomixis rice has not been created although the apomixis lines are extremely important in agriculture. Apomixis is a term that a plant creates new plants without fertilization and in wheat, apomictic lines have been created for over decades. My research aim is to create new apomictic lines in rice by efficient screening of my own method in Arabidopsis and by modifing rice genome in a new method. The other aim is to provide bio-resource from CO2 resource by modifing genes and fixing the important traits in rice apomictic lines.