Takashi Akagi: The Plant Cell First Author

Takashi Akagi, co-first author of “Genome-wide cis-decoding for expression design in tomato using cistrome data and explainable deep learning”

Current Position: Research Professor, Grad Sch Environ Life Sci, Okayama University, Japan

Education: B.S., M.S. and PhD in agricultural biology, Kyoto University, Japan

Non-scientific Interests: Clarinet, Piano, Composition/arrangement of music pieces

Brief bio:

I started my research life initially in fruit second metabolism, for my PhD thesis (2011). I had a turning point to start bioinformatics and genomics in my visiting research at Prof. Luca Comai lab, University of California Davis, focusing on plant sex determination with persimmon. After back to Japan, techniques for bioinformatics have been further developed to evolutionary biology and also to deep neural network frameworks, or so called “artificial intelligence (AI)”, to apply to image diagnosis and genomic/genetic information in horticultural crops. Current interests of my lab are wide, while mainly in reproductive systems in horticultural crops, including sex determination, fruit development and maturing, and flowering time.