The Japanese Ministry of Forestry, Fisheries, and Agriculture (MAFF, Tokyo) hopes to stimulate research activities in plant bioinformatics in Japan with the Rice Genome Simulator, a new project to be launched in April. However, biotech companies have so far shown little interest in the project, reflecting the project's lack of focus and the underdeveloped state of plant bioinformatics in Japan.
According to the project outline, by the time it is completed in 2007, the Rice Genome Simulator should enable scientists to undertake “virtual breeding experiments”—that is, to simulate in silico the probable outcome of a breeding experiment between two rice variants. The idea is to develop new databases for metabolic pathway analysis, and then integrate them with various existing rice genome databases and scientific literature on rice genetics into a “simulation environment” with extensive visualization capabilities. “The goal is to develop a breeding simulations system for specific genetic traits for which causative genes have been isolated,” says project leader Kenichi Higo, director in the Department of Molecular Genetics at the National Institute for Agribiological Ressources (NIAR) in Tsukuba.
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