In the coming year, scientists from Beijing Huada Genetic Research Center, Lab on Phytobiological Technologies of Institute of Genetics of Chinese Academy of Sciences, and National Research Center on Hybrid Rice Engineering Technologies will join their efforts to work on the decoding of super hybrid rice's genes, the first of its kind in the world so as to improve hybrid rice yield and quality and create a permanent foundation for China's leading position in hybrid rice production. Chinese scientists hope to create a technological innovation approach for scaled industrialization running from genetic research to molecule breeding and to field plantation in a timeframe from 3 to 5 years. Rice genome is composed of 430 million base pairs, while human genome is composed of 3 billion base pairs. Decoding super rice will help people to identify the relevant genes in wheat, corns and other major food crops and spur the basic and applied genetic studies of food crops , said Prof. Yang Huanming of Chinese Academy of Sciences. Rice is the most important food crop in the world.
China is the country with the largest yield of rice and rich species.
In this context, it is of great scientific and economic significance to conducting intercomparison genetic rice studies in China. Its basic development work relating to synthesizing technique, performance assessment, application areas and coating techniques has been completed with the comprehensive indicators reaching the advanced level of their foreign counterparts, ready for industrialization. With numerous merits such as low production costs, no pollution for both manufacturing and application processes and permanent anti-bacteria coating, the technology is of extensive market applications suchas in the fields of air purification, ceramics, building materials, dinnerware, medical instruments, household electronic appliances, autos and transportation, environmental protection, degradable plastics and other daily products. Scientists from six countries including US, UK, Germany, France, Japan and China engaged in this great endeavor for sequencing 3 billion base pairs of human genome have worked out human genome maps similar to the one for the anatomic purpose. Dr. Yang Huanming, Chinese focal point of International Human Genome Organization, Director of Human Genome Center, Genetics Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, was part of the announcement activity in the capacity of Chinese representative.