Dr. TSUJIMOTO Yasuhiro, Project Leader of the Africa rice farming system project, and colleagues from the Crop, Livestock and Environment Division received the 20th Japanese Society of Crop Science Best Paper Award for the paper titled "AZ-97 (Oryza sativa ssp. Indica) exhibits superior biomass production by maintaining the tiller numbers, leaf width, and leaf elongation rate under phosphorus deficiency".

This award is given to members of the Crop Science Society of Japan who published outstanding papers in the journal Plant Production Science. In this paper, Dr. Tsujimoto and colleagues evaluated the morphological characteristics of indica rice AZ-97, which exhibits high performance under highly P-deficient fields in Madagascar, and found that this rice genotype maintained high biomass by increasing tiller number and leaf width even under phosphorus deficiency conditions. Phosphorus-deficient soil is one of the major factors hindering crop production in Madagascar and other tropical countries. The findings of this study are expected to be useful for rice breeding to improve productivity under such phosphorus-deficient conditions.

Yasuhiro Tsujimoto, Mitsukazu Sakata, Viviane Raharinivo, Juan Pariasca Tanaka, Toshiyuki Takai (2021) AZ-97 (Oryza sativa ssp. Indica) exhibits superior biomass production by maintaining the tiller numbers, leaf width, and leaf elongation rate under phosphorus deficiency.
https://doi.org/10.1080/1343943X.2020.1808026