Our lives are supported by crops. Grains such as rice and soybeans are not only familiar to us as staple foods and processed products, but are also used for various purposes such as animal feed and energy source. In the past few decades, the increasing demand for food has been met by increasing “crop production efficiency per unit land area. With climate change and further increases in demand expected in the future, further increasing productivity per unit land area is an urgent issue.

Recent advances in plant physiology and molecular biology are gradually revealing the molecular mechanisms that control crop productivity, as well as strategies for increasing productivity. On the other hand, it is not always easy to directly link cutting-edge biological findings to agricultural productivity improvement because of the myriad factors involved in production in the field.

Our laboratory is currently focusing on the variation that exists among rice and soybean varieties, and is trying to unravel the productivity and potential of crops from various perspectives, including advanced photosynthetic physiology and its genetic control, development of growth diagnosis technology using image analysis based on deep learning, and search for new varieties and cultivation methods with an eye to climate change. We are trying to unravel the productivity and potential of crops from various perspectives. We place the utmost importance on conducting hands-on field trials of crops as a place to integrate and demonstrate these specific themes. We believe that a deep understanding of crop ecology and actual crop cultivation through cultivation is the best way to get a true picture of crops.

We hope that many people will become interested in our field of crop productivity improvement.

Tanaka Yu,Research Professor of Plant Production Science

• Career

2005 Crop Science Laboratory, Faculty of Agriculture, Kyoto University

2011 Doctor of Agriculture, Kyoto University

2011 Postdoctoral Fellow, Faculty of Science, Kyoto University

2012 Assistant Professor, Crop Science Laboratory, Faculty of Agriculture, Kyoto University

2013-2014 University of Illinois, USA (adjunct)

October 2016 JST PRESTO Researcher (concurrent position)

2019 Crop Science Society of Japan Research Encouragement Award

2022 Japan Crop Science Advancement Award

2023 Associate Professor, Department of Crop Production Technology, Okayama University

2024 Research Professor, Okayama University

• Hobbies

Piano / Marathon running