●Soil Science and Plant Nutrition
Plant Nutrition

SUGIMOTO, T. Professor sugimoto@kobe-u. ac.jp
MIYAKE, C. Associate Professor cmiyake@hawk.kobe-u. ac.jp
SHIRAISHI, N. Assistant Professor naomasas@kobe-u. ac.jp

Plants are anchored to the ground and subjected to whatever the environment has to offer them; they cannot move to a more hospitable location. To overcome this vulnerability, plants have developed a highly flexible metabolism that makes it possible for them to accommodate environmental changes metabolically. Plants often have several different ways of accomplishing the same step in a metabolic pathway. This metabolic flexibility in plants is perhaps best illustrated when genetic engineering is used to knock out supposedly critical enzyme activities and the resulting transgenic plants are able to grow and develop more or less normally.

From this viewpoint, the aim of our research program is to understand the mechanisms and control of nitrogen assimilation and partitioning in plants growing under rapidly changing environmental conditions. The current research focus in our lab is on understanding the regulatory system of a whole process covering from the perception and transduction of a nitrogen signal till the production and quality of food resources. A significant effort in our lab now concentrates on dissecting the molecular details of post-translational regulation of nitrate reductase activity.

●Plant Nutrition Web Site