Professor Takeshi Obayashi of Tohoku University, who developed the plant co-expression database "ATTED-II," has received the PCP Top Cited Paper Award.

On Nov 6, 2025, Professor Takeshi Obayashi of the Graduate School of Information Sciences at Tohoku University received the 2026 PCP Top Cited Paper Awards from the Japanese Society of Plant Physiologists for his original paper on the plant gene coexpression database ATTED-II, "ATTED-II v11: A Plant Gene Coexpression Database Using a Sample Balancing Technique by Subagging of Principal Components."

The PCP Top Cited Paper Awards are given to authors who have published original and internationally outstanding papers that contribute to the advancement of plant science, among those published in the academic journal Plant and Cell Physiology, published by the Japanese Society of Plant Physiologists. The number of citations of the selected papers is 105 (Google Scholar) as of November 2025.

"ATTED-II" is a database of plant gene co-expression and currently contains gene co-expression data for 11 plant species, including wheat and barley. With ATTED-II, you can investigate genes whose expression is correlated or inversely correlated with the gene of interest, investigate the environment or conditions under which two genes are co-expressed, and investigate the physiological functions and regulatory relationships of these co-expressed genes.

Meanwhile, in recent years, with the reduction in cost of next-generation sequencers, genetic analysis of various non-model plants, including practical plants, has become possible. However, research on non-model plants has only recently begun, and the existence of many genes with unknown functions remains a challenge.

It is known that genes whose expression is coordinately regulated under similar environments or the same conditions often belong to gene groups that carry out a series of related functions, such as biosynthetic pathways or signal transduction pathways. Therefore, ATTED-II is expected to serve as one of the information platforms that will bridge the knowledge revealed in model plants, where research is progressing, to the analysis of non-model plants, where the functions of many genes have yet to be elucidated. Professor Obayashi and his colleagues are currently working to improve the functionality for comparing co-expression information and to develop tools to analyze the functions of co-expressed genes between different plant species.

ATTED-II is developed as a part of JST Database Integration Coordination Program (DICP), "Platform of gene network information for non-model plants" (Principal Investigator: OBAYASHI Takeshi, Professor, Graduate School of Information Sciences, Tohoku University).