Molecular
and cellular mechanisms of plant growth and development under temperature
stress
In the present world there is a huge imbalance between population
growth and food production. By 2050, world population will increase by 34% to
9.1 billion, whereas potential cultivable land area will increase only 5%
((FAO; www. fao.org). In addition, crops susceptibility to various abiotic stresses, such as temperature stress, make it a difficult
task to maintaining the crop production.
For instance, low temperature stress caused financial damage totaling 158
billion yen in fiscal year 2009 (Rahman, 2012, Ashraf and Rahman, 2018). Global
warming also causes serious damage to the crop productivity. The combined
annual loss rendered by high temperature is $5 billion (Lobell
and Field, 2007).
Because of the current climatic changes, temperature stress will have
a huge impact in future crop production. Our research aims to produce new
breeds of crops that can tolerate temperature stress by understanding the
molecular mechanism of temperature stress regulation pathway in plant.
Molecular
mechanism of herbicide action
The
use of herbicides is an integral part of agriculture and the current world
herbicide market share is $ 48 billion. Japan's agriculture also uses a large
amount of herbicide, its market size is 920 billion
yen. The use of this large amount of herbicide has a huge impact on
environmental balance. Among the available herbicides, auxinic
herbicides are the most widely used herbicides around the world. These
herbicides possess selectivity which kill only dicots but not the monocots. However, the molecular
mechanism of the selectivity of these herbicides has not yet been elucidated.
We
identified actin as a molecular target of these
herbicides. Auxinic herbicides 2,4-D, dicamba and picloram break down actin, but naturally occurring auxin
IAA bundles it slightly (Rahman et al., 2006;
Nakasone et al., 2012; Takahashi et al., 2018, unpublished data).
Our laboratory focuses on finding molecular regulators that are
specifically associated with this phenomenon. We believe that finding genes
that regulate this process will help us to develop more efficient herbicides,
reduce the use of herbicides in the agriculture sector and make agriculture
practices more environmentally friendly
Elucidation
of new metal transporters to facilitate phytoremediation
Soil contamination with various metals such as cadmium, cesium and arsenic is a big problem for safe crop production. Phytoremediation is a smart, environmentally friendly, low cost technology to eliminate such soil contamination. The success of phytoremediation technology depends largely on the transport of metal from soil to plants. Therefore, finding new specific transporters for specific metals is an important issue. Our laboratory focuses on identifying new uptake transporters for cesium, cadmium and arsenic. Recently, we identified two new cesium uptake transporters. The next step is to develop new transgenic plants that overexpresses or have mutations in these uptake transporters, which will be used to clean up the soil or growing crops that will not uptake the metal contaminants.