Centers & Labs

RIKEN Innovation Center

Ion Beam Breeding Laboratory

Team Leader: Tomoko Abe (D.Agr.)

Plant breeding with heavy-ion beams is a technology unique to Japan. Heavy-ion beams are generated by accelerating atomic ions using a particle accelerator. The RI Beam Factory (RIBF) consists of five cyclotorons and two injector lilacs for high energy ion beam research. Our facility has high performance to create new cultivars for plants and microbes. Over last decade, molecular biology has made great advancements through technological innovation. We plan to use high-throughput DNA sequencing techniques such as next-generation sequence instruments and microarray technologies for analysis of gene mutations. Mutants have become more and more useful and important in modern genetic studies, enabling the discovery of genes that control important traits, and revealing the functions and mechanisms underlying their operations.

Research Subjects

  • Development of the high-throughput methods for the detection of gene deletion
  • New irradiation treatment depending on the DNA-deletion size
  • Ion-beam breeding for salt-tolerance rice in Miyagi Prefecture
  • Ion-beam breeding for "Super Sanriku-Wakame"

Publications

  1. Kazama Y., Nishihara K., Bergero R., Fujiwara M., Abe T., Charlesworth D. and Kawano S.:
    "SlWUS1; An X-linked Gene Having No Homologous Y-Linked Copy in Silene latifolia"
    G3: Genes, Genomes, Genetics 2, 1269-1278 (2012)
  2. Kazama Y., Ma L., Hirano T., Ohbu S., Shirakawa Y., Hatakeyama S., Tanaka S. and Abe T.:
    "Rapid evaluation of effective linear energy transfer in heavy ion utagenesis of Arabidopsis thaliana,"
    Plant Biotech. 29, 440-444 (2012)
  3. Kazama Y., Fujiwara M.T., Takehisa H., Ohbu S., Saito H., Ichida H., Hayashi Y., Abe T.:
    "Characterization of a heavy-ion induced white flower mutant of allotetraploid Nicotiana tabacum"
    Plant Cell Rep. 32, 11-19 (2013)
  4. T. Hirano, Y. Kazama, S. Ohbu, Y. Shirakawa, L. Yang, T. Kambara, N. Fukunishi, T. Abe:
    "A novel method utilizing heavy-ion beams for efficient induction of large deletions in Arabidopsis thaliana. "
    Mutation Research: Fundamental and Molecular Mechanisms of Mutagenesis, 735: 19-31 (2012)
  5. Hirano T., Takagi K., Hoshino Y. and Abe T.:
    "DNA damage response in male gametes of Cyrtanthus mackenii during pollen tube growth"
    AoB PLANTS, DOI: 0.1093/aobpla/plt004 (2013)
  6. Ma L., Kazama Y., Inoue H., Abe T., Hatakeyama S. and Tanaka S.:
    "The type of mutations induced by carbon-ion beam irradiation of the filamentous fungus Neurospora crassa"
    Fungal Biol. in press (2013)
  7. Niwa K., Abe T.:
    "Chapter 7: Heavy-ion beam mutagenesis in Porphyra Yezoensis, in Porphyra yezoensis"
    Porphyra yezoensis: Frontiers in Physiological and Molecular Biological Research, Mikami K. (Ed), NOVA Publishers, Inc. NY, USA, pp119-132 (2012)