Rate My Professor Takeshi Izawa

Professor Takeshi Izawa serves as Professor in the Department of Agricultural and Environmental Biology within the Graduate School of Agricultural and Life Sciences at The University of Tokyo. He leads the Laboratory of Plant Breeding and Genetics, continuing the eighth-generation professorship lineage that began in 1906. Izawa holds a Ph.D. from Osaka Prefecture University. His career includes positions at Plantech Research Institute, where he helped establish the rice transformation system in collaboration with Dr. Ko Shimamoto, and at the National Institute of Agrobiological Sciences from October 2001 to March 2016, before joining The University of Tokyo.

Izawa's academic interests center on the molecular genetics of photoperiodic flowering in plants, using rice as a primary model for short-day plants. His investigations cover genetic mechanisms of daylight sensing for bloom initiation, alterations in gene functions during rice domestication analyzed through next-generation sequencing data, and the development of rice varieties with farmer-controllable flowering times under the Hanasaka Jiisan Project. Additionally, he pioneers new breeding techniques utilizing genome editing and examines crop responses to environmental cues. Among his influential publications are "Fertile transgenic rice plants regenerated from transformed protoplasts" (Nature, 1989), "Phytochrome mediates the external light signal to repress FT orthologs in photoperiodic flowering of rice" (Genes & Development, 2002), "An SNP caused loss of seed shattering during rice domestication" (Science, 2006), "Deletion in a gene associated with grain size increased yields during rice domestication" (Nature Genetics, 2008), "Ehd1, a B-type response regulator in rice, confers short-day promotion of flowering and controls FT-like gene expression independently of Hd1" (Genes & Development, 2004), and more recent "A 65-kb Deletion Survey Identifies a Distal Cis-Regulatory Region for Red-Light Induction of Ghd7, a Key Rice Floral Repressor" (PNAS, 2025), "Fertilization controls tiller numbers via transcriptional regulation of a MAX1-like gene in rice cultivation" (Nature Communications, 2023). With over 13,400 citations on Google Scholar, Izawa's contributions have profoundly shaped understanding of rice domestication genetics and advanced strategies for climate-resilient crop breeding.