Ai Kitazumi

Ai Kitazumi has been working with Benildo de los Reyes since undergraduate (genotyping overexpression lines, making transformation constructs), master's (cis element analysis in orthologous transcription factors, miRNA profiling and target prediction in landraces of potatoes, comparative genomics of wild species of Oryza), Ph.D (high throughput sequencing on salinity tolerant individuals in transgressive rice population), moving from wet lab experiments to bioinformatics. In projects on stress response in rice and cotton, her role is a rice genome/transcript assembler with a goal to understand a mechanism of how genome shock upon hybridization of genetically distant parents and through successive rounds of meiosis, through integrating DNA-seq, RNA-seq, BS-seq, and action of ncRNA and transposons. Current analysis has revealed variation beyond SNP level and she is working on further analysis that might change how we look at hybrids and breeding lines.