Profile

Dr. Rehenuma Tabassum received undergraduate and graduate education at Sher-e-Bangla Agricultural University and Sylhet Agricultural University, respectively, where fundamental and advanced courses for Crop Science, for example, from Biochemistry, Genetics to Seed Biology and Crop Research Methodology were learned. Later, she completed her PhD from Crop Science Laboratory, Kyoto University, Japan in May, 2020 as a Japanese Government (Monbukagakusho: MEXT) Scholarship fellow. The aim of Dr. Tabassum’s PhD research was to investigate the molecular mechanism and adaptive technology of white immature grains focusing on plastid-type heat stress proteins in a conditional chalky grain mutant rice 'flo11-2'. She could successfully clone and characterize the cpHsp70-2 gene from the mutant and found that lowered function of cpHsp70-2 protein is involved with the chalkiness of the mutant. The research also integrates the effect of meteorological and physiological changes on chalkiness of rice grain. Specifically she focused on how the sensitivity of the mutant deal with increased temperature at multiple growth conditions. Her work has appeared in several top-tier journals (The Plant Journal, Plant Production Science etc.) and international conference proceedings. She is currently a JSPS Postdoctoral fellow (Standard) at the Department of Agricultural and Environmental Biology, Graduate School of Agricultural and Life Sciences, The University of Tokyo, Japan.