Impact of biotechnology on agriculture in China.

country in the world, facing great pressures regarding population growth, environmental deterioration and resource depletion, has ranked plant biology as one of its highest priorities since the early 1950s, especially in the area of agricultural development. Since plant biotechnology became available, it has developed rapidly in agriculture-related plant biology research. Two crucial innovations – tissue and anther culture and DNA recombination – marked the emergence of plant biotechnology onto the world stage in the 1960s and 1970s. Unfortunately, China was immersed in the Cultural Revolution during that period, and plant scientists were not allowed to do any basic research, although some research related to crop breeding was permitted. For ~20 years, plant tissue culture and anther culture were among the most active research areas in plant science in China because it was believed to be an efficient tool for plant breeding. Many talented young scientists at that time devoted their careers to developing and improving the technology [1]. To date, >700 plant species have been cultivated successfully via tissue and/or anther culture [2], and >20 new agronomic varieties have been obtained using these techniques [1]. DNA recombination techniques were not introduced into China until the early 1980s because of a lack of facilities, reagents and personnel with proper training. Before that, isozyme analysis with electrophoresis was popular, in part, because people believed that with this inexpensive and relatively simple technique it was possible to investigate genetic as well as physiological changes in breeding and the regulation of plant growth. Also, because hybrid rice was massively used during that time, there were demands for molecular markers for screening and quality control of hybrid seeds. During the mid-1980s, the first batch of visiting scholars sent to Western countries after the Cultural Revolution introduced DNA recombination techniques into China. Scientists, mainly those based in the institutes of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) such as the Institute of Microbiology (Beijing), the Shanghai Institute of Plant Physiology, the Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry and the Institute of Genetics (Beijing), started to work with plasmids, viruses and Agrobacteria. Over about five years, the creation of the National Laboratory of Plant Molecular Genetics (Shanghai) laid the foundation for plant molecular biological research in China. One noteworthy invention from the Institute of Biochemistry by Guang-Yu Zhou, is the technique of transforming foreign genes via the pollen tube pathway [3]. Although this approach has been controversial since it was …