National Engineering Laboratory for Crop Molecular Breeding

Molecular breeding can achieve directly selection and effective aggregation of genes, which greatly improves breeding efficiency and shortens the breeding period. It has great potential in production increase, quality improvement and resistance enhancement. It has become an important direction of modern crop breeding. The construction of National Engineering Laboratory of Crop Molecular Breeding is beneficial for building a national molecular breeding system and promoting comprehensive upgrade of the country’s crop breeding technology. It will accelerate the process of breeding new crop varieties and promote rapid development of the seed industry.

The National Engineering Laboratory for Molecular Breeding focuses on the production needs of four major food crops, namely rice, wheat, corn and soybeans. It aims at making breakthroughs in creating new varieties. Its main task is to build efficient crop molecular breeding technology system and to make key achievement in three core techniques, which are large-scale gene discovery technologies, practical genotype selection techniques, and varieties design engineering. It develops important trait gene and its practical molecular markers and marker detection technology. It works on building an efficient molecular breeding technology system and carries out germplasm innovation to cultivate new varieties with high yield, good quality, resilience and efficiency. Through organic convergence of the upstream and downstream, the center builds a bridge between molecular breeding and seed industry and constructs a new integrated system of industry, academy and research.

The crop molecular breeding technique platform will be completed within 5 years. It will focus on gene mapping and gene marker technology and developing new molecular markers. Four research groups will be built under the Lab , which are new gene discovery, molecular marker detection, molecular design of varieties, and molecular breeding.