Han Tianfu poses for an image with soybeans he breeds in Sanya, south China’s Hainan province. (Photo/Li Shengfu)
Recently, on the experimental base of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences’ (CAAS) National Nanfan Research Institute in Sanya, south China’s Hainan province, researcher Han Tianfu and his crew on the CAAS Institute of Crop Sciences held a “birthday celebration” for a number of uncommon soybean crops.
Sown in November final 12 months, these crops have matured into strong specimens reaching two meters in top with thick, sturdy stems. These “soybean trees” are the end result of years of devoted analysis.
As chief skilled of the CAAS’ National Nanfan Research Institute’s innovation crew for soybean breeding applied sciences, Han has studied soybeans for over 30 years.
He defined that soybeans exhibit excessive sensitivity to day size (photoperiod) and temperature. They detect the refined shortening of daylight and lengthening of night time following the summer season solstice, triggering flowering and pod formation. This inherent sensitivity sometimes requires 10-12 years to develop a brand new, high-quality soybean selection.
To speed up this prolonged course of, Han’s crew moved their major breeding work to the Nanfan breeding base in Sanya, the place gentle and temperature situations make the area a pure “accelerator” for crop breeding.
This strategy — profiting from the favorable local weather in southern Hainan to advance generations, propagate supplies, and conduct identification checks — is called Nanfan, which accurately means “breeding in the south.”
Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China, greater than 70 p.c of all new crop varieties have utilized Nanfan. Each winter and spring, massive numbers of agricultural researchers carry breeding supplies to Hainan, shortening the breeding cycle by one-third to one-half.
However, soybeans are basic short-day crops. When many northern varieties are dropped at low-latitude Hainan, they flower prematurely and stay too brief for important hybridization work, the very basis of creating improved varieties.
Drawing on their understanding of the soybean organic clock, Han’s crew mixed this data with fashionable LED supplemental lighting to create a man-made “long-day” atmosphere in Hainan. This permits northern soybean varieties — in any other case unsuited to the native local weather — to develop tall and vigorous, offering robust feminine dad and mom for large-scale hybridization.
At the identical time, the crew has constructed China’s first core soybean pollen financial institution, storing collected pollen at low temperatures for year-round use. This innovation extends the hybridization window from a mere two weeks per 12 months to year-round operation.
Han Tianfu exchanges experiences with a international skilled on soybean breeding. (Photo/Li Shengfu)
These breakthroughs have enabled Han’s crew to develop an engineered breeding system reaching a number of annual generations underneath field-scale situations. Global soybean germplasm now converges in Sanya, compressing breeding cycles from 10-12 years to roughly seven years.
“By integrating domestic and international germplasm, we have developed varieties ranging from long-juvenile lines that can grow into ‘soybean trees’ in the tropics to ultra-early-maturing varieties suited to climates at 55 degrees north latitude. From south to north, we have expanded the adaptive boundaries of soybeans and laid a solid germplasm foundation for Chinese soybeans to ‘go global,'” Han stated.
The crew is now incorporating synthetic intelligence and genomic choice into breeding processes, enhancing precision and effectivity. The two-meter soybean plant represents not simply scientific achievement, however symbolizes China’s breeding {industry} innovation in Hainan.
In latest years, Sanya has targeted on nationwide strategic wants, accelerated the event of Yazhou Bay Science and Technology City, and made each effort to construct a “Silicon Valley” for Nanfan, remodeling the area from a seasonal website for advancing generations into an built-in innovation hub that helps analysis, manufacturing, alternate, and commercialization.
A researcher conducts an experiment on the Yazhou Bay Seed Laboratory in Yazhou Bay Science and Technology City, Sanya, south China’s Hainan province. (Photo/Yuan Chen)
Today, Hainan is shifting from a seasonal “breeding base” right into a seed-industry “Silicon Valley” that draws high international expertise and applied sciences. The rising “Nanfan Silicon Valley” now options not solely standardized breeding fields, but additionally seed laboratories, germplasm useful resource banks, and high-throughput phenotyping platforms. Researchers can now be stationed there year-round, finishing up full-process analysis and growth from gene discovery to selection testing, dramatically enhancing breeding effectivity.
This transformation will considerably strengthen China’s capability for authentic innovation within the seed {industry} and supply a firmer germplasm basis for safeguarding nationwide meals safety.
(Web editor: Zhong Wenxing, Liang Jun)