The announcement came during an international gathering of leading authorities from around the world to discuss advances in genomics research. BGI will focus its first project on the super hybrid rice developed by Professor Yuan Longping at the National Center of Hybrid Rice Development in the Hunan province.
China is the biggest producer and consumer of rice in the world.
The super hybrid rice yields as much as 17070kg of rice per hectares. The construction of the super hybrid rice genome will lay the fundamental groundwork for understanding the genetic structure of crops with larger genomes such as wheat, barley and corn. The second project will concentrate on the Meishan pig, which is famous for its high reproductive rates. The Chinese people domesticated pigs over 9,000 years ago for meat consumption, and pork remains the number one protein food source in the Chinese diet. The genome draft will greatly assist the world pork industry in using modern genetic technology and tools to gain better breeding for efficient meat production, as well as with disease prevention and environmental-friendly industrialization.