The livestock products of our country are appreciated for their high quality and safety, but there are slightly expensive than foreign products. Also, environment surrounding the stock-raising industry of our country including the remarkable rise of the feed price and the outbreak of the illness greatly changes, and the decline in number of farmers continues. Development and spread of our country's original production systems are required, and it is necessary, to increase amount of production, to plan the export expansion to stabilize stock raising management in the future, and to supply livestock products steadily. The construction in an original style of the excellence farm animal production which possess not only the higher production efficiency but also high-quality livestock products and the optimization of the production system are necessary. On the other hand, genes and genomic information in the farm animals are increased by the progress of the genome analysis technology, and it becomes easy to obtain genome information such as the SNP information by using commercial DNA array. Therefore, to provide useful information to estimate breeding value effectively, we search for the genetic information which improves productivity and product quality in cattle, pigs and chickens using such a genome analysis technology.
Pollination by honeybee is important to improve the quality of the agricultural products and stable production in agriculture. Currently, more than 200,000 honeybee hives are used for the purpose of pollination in Japan. Under these circumstances, our missions are to improve the ability of honeybee as pollinator, and the optimal way to use honeybees effectively. For these goals, using genetic approach, we challenge to develop the new tools, such as simple detection method of bee diseases, and to make better health and feed management, such as infection restraint technologies.
Unit Leader
Eiji KOBAYASHI
Research Topic : Application of genes, genomes, and genetics information in animal breeding
Unit Members
| Kiyoshi KIMURA | Senior Principal Researcher | Development of effective management techniques for improving the utility of honey bees as pollinators. |
| Hideaki TAKAHASHI | Principal Researcher | Genetic association between SNPs and meat quality traits |
| Takahiro TAGAMI | Principal Researcher | Development of effective preservation method for avian genetic resources using germ cells. Development of effective method of genome editing in chicken. Functional gene analysis of sexual differentiation of avian species. |
| Mikio YOSHIYAMA | Principal Researcher | Development of effective management techniques for improving the utility of honey bees as pollinators. |
| Mari OGIHARA | Limited-term Researcher | |
| Yuki NAKAJIMA | Researcher |
