Prof Murata Inaugural Lecture

Prof Murata during his lecture

Holder of the Tan Sri Dato’ Philip Kuok Professorial Chair in Agriculture Science Prof Dr Minoru Murata held his inaugural lecture at UTAR Sungai Long Campus on 24 January 2019.

The momentous lecture was attended by Chancellor of UTAR Tun Dr Ling Liong Sik, Dean of Faculty of Science Assoc Prof Dr Lim Tuck Meng, Universiti Malaya Centre for Research in Biotechnology for Agriculture (CEBAR) Tan Boon Chin, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia Plant Genetic and Biotechnology Prof Dr R Wickneswari Ratnam, Advanced Agriecological Research Sdn Bhd Biotechnologist Dr Gan Siau Ting, UTAR staff and students.

Prof Murata began his lecture by introducing the background of Japan tertiary education, “They are doing very well and the reason why they are not significant in the world rankings is because they do not use English as the medium of learning.”

Listening attentively (front row, from left): Tun Ling and Dr Lim with the audience

He also shared his childhood experience, including his love for basketball and his dream to become a veterinarian. He shared that he was greatly inspired by Kinji Imanishi, a Japanese ecologist and anthropologist who founded Kyoto University Primate Research Institute and Dr Hitoshi Kihara who was an expert in evolutionary biology and genetics of higher plants, plants of relatively complex or advanced characteristics, especially vascular plants.

He then shared his academic journey that has landed him where he is today, including his PhD studies on “Mutagenetic effects by seed aging in barley and peas”.

Among his major contributions are the discovery of one of the herbicides, 2,4,5-T’s strong mutagenic effects on induction of sister chromatid exchanges (SCE) when added to wheat tissue culture as an auxin hormone source; established a high-sensitive fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) technique to visualize genes directly on the chromosomes of Arabidopsis thaliana; identify the repetitive DNA sequences that localize preferentially on the Arabidopsis centromeres, and clarified their molecular structure and function. Prof Murata’s focused on the Arabidopsis centromeres had enabled his success in isolation of genes encoding the proteins such as AtCENP-C and AtMis12, which are essential for centromere function. Further to that, he also developed the multi-colour fluorescence RNA in situ hybridization technique to visualize mRNAs in the model plant, Arabidopsis thaliana. He and his team had found in one of the transgenic Arabidopsis plants a stable and transmissible-to-next-generation small ring chromosome. His effort to create ring chromosomes artificially by combining the sequence-specific recombination and transposon systems had managed  to confirm that ring chromosomes are stable in Arabidopsis.

Prof Murata is currently the Chair for the Tan Sri Dato’ Philip Kuok Professor of Agricultural Science at UTAR Faculty of Science Department of Agricultural and Food Science. He is also the Emeritus Professor of Okayama University, Japan. His areas of specialisation are plant molecular genetics, plant breeding, plant tissue culture and cytogenetics. He graduated from Kyoto University, Japan with a bachelor’s degree in Agricultural Science in Experimental Genetics in 1976. In 1979, he earned his doctorate degree in Plants Genetics from Colorado State University, USA. Thereafter, he became a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Nevada, USA and University of California, Davis, USA. Later, he joined as a lecturer at the College of Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine, Nihon University, Japan in 1983. He became the Professor and Director of the Research Institute for Bio-resources, Okayama University, Japan in 2000.

Dr Lim introducing Prof Murata prior to the lecture