On Monday, February 19, 2024, 58 young agricultural trainees from Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines visited JIRCAS. The trainees were divided into two groups for an introduction to JIRCAS research (indoor lecture) and an outdoor tour at the Hachimandai Experimental Field.
On February 2, 2024, Project Leader FUJITA Yasunari and Senior Researcher NAGATOSHI Yukari from JIRCAS engaged in a cross-talk session at the Friday Night Science Café with Dr. YAMADA Koji and Dr. IZUMA Dylan Shun from the Human Spaceflight Technology Directorate of JAXA.
The JIRCAS research on the “Development of resilient crops and production technologies” is also linked to the “Research on production of crops adapted to the space environment”.
Tomorrow is Soybean Day, a celebration deeply rooted in the Japanese tradition of “setsubun”, which is observed as the day before the arrival of spring. In commemoration of Soybean Day, today's feature highlights the importance of soybeans in Japan and around the world. The spotlight extends to ongoing soybean research at JIRCAS, offering insights into the crop's status and impact.
On December 1, 2023, JIRCAS hosted a hybrid official TICAD 30th anniversary side event, "Toward Building Sustainable and Resilient Food Systems in Africa". We are pleased to announce that the video of the seminar is now available on the JIRCAS website. Please take a look.
Tillering in rice and other cereal crops is an important trait for determining panicle number, but it is also a trait that can be easily affected by unstable environments such as climate change and nutrient deficiencies. The MP3 gene, recently discovered at JIRCAS, has been shown to promote tillering and moderately increase panicle number even in such unstable environments, and is expected to be a useful technology for sustainable food production.
Soybean seed provides more than 71% of the world's vegetable protein and 29% of its oil, but they are negatively correlated, making it difficult to develop varieties with high content of both. Wild soybean, the ancestral species of soybean, is an important genetic resource for improving the protein content of cultivated soybean varieties. JIRCAS has succeeded in identifying genes derived from wild soybean that increase protein content without reducing lipid content.