Hitachi, Ltd.

Yumiko Igarashi

Daisuke Suzuki

Masakazu Sugaya

Koichi Terada

Taku Nakamura

Takayuki Nozaki

Masaharu Kiyama

Guangbin Zhou

Ryota Nakajima

Shizu Takeda

Yoshu Yoshiba

There is the problem that a liquid culture medium fed by a pump has a high frequency of contact with a gas during movement in a tube, and the pH value of the liquid culture medium before and after feeding changes easily. In a liquid feeder and a cell culture apparatus provided therewith, a feed pipeis connected with a gas bag, the liquid to be fed into the feed pipeis fed so as to be sandwiched by a gas for suppressing the qualitative changes of the liquid. Furthermore, the gas bag is connected with a containerfor holding a liquid, and holds the gas for suppressing qualitative changes of the liquid in a gas phase of the container.

Liquid feeding device and cell culture device

A cDNA library prepared from rice seedlings is subjected to screening using Arabidopisis proline transporter gene cDNA as a probe. The positive clones thus obtained are subcloned and examined for their length through restriction enzyme treatment and 5&prime; and 3&prime; terminal nucleotide sequences to give a rice proline transporter gene cDNA-containing clone. This cDNA is sequenced and, based on the results of homology searching, a rice proline transporter gene is identified which shows high (68%) homology (amino acid level) with the Arabidopsis-derived ones and is very similar in transmembrane domain (hydropathy plot analysis) and expression pattern (Northern analysis) thereto.

Gene for proline transporter in rice

Growing community of inventors

Tokyo, Japan

Yumiko Igarashi