Yoji moved to Okayama Univ. in January, 2020

Welcome to KAWANO Lab

Earth's population is expected to reach 9 billion by 2050. Plant agriculture must change fundamentally to support this number of people by mid-century. Rice is the most important food crop and therefore, improvement of rice is a key research goal. Our ultimate goal is to design new rice plants to cope with biotic and abiotic stresses and improve important agronomic traits. We have been working on immune receptors and the small GTPaseOsRac1, which are major components of rice immunity. A comprehensive understanding of immune receptors and OsRac1 functions would allow the design of rice immune system to control pathogens. We are also interested in how plants orchestrate epigenetic regulations in responding to abiotic stresses. To address these issue, we have been investigating rice as a model system with a combination of several cutting-edge technologies including live imaging and gene editing.