 | | The year 2018 is an important year for us to start to establish Innovative Academy of Seed Design and to witness a continued rapid development of the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology. School of Advanced Agricultural Sciences at University of CAS was established in January 2018, and recruited 223 graduate students for the first year. IGDB published 397 SCI-indexed papers, and 26 patents and 16 crop variety rights were granted. Dr. Jiayang Li was awarded the Future Science Prize in Life Science for his pioneering contributions to the systematical studies on the molecular mechanisms of specific traits of rice and adoption of new technologies to breeding new rice varieties of high yield and quality. The progresses on molecular design breeding of rice was selected the Top Ten Pieces of News in Science and Technology of Last Year in China. Drs. Jiayang Li, Qi Xie and Jianmin Zhou were recognized by Clarivate Analytics Hightly-Cited Researchers 2018. Dr. John Speakman was selected to be a Fellow of Royal Society. Dr. Yuling Jiao was awarded the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholar. Drs. Yuling Jiao and Lin Ma were honored young and middle-aged leading scientists in science |
and technology innovation in the Innovative Talent Promotion Program. The team on Genome Editing of Safe and Efficient Crop was selected as the "Innovative Team of Key Fields" in the Innovative Talent Promotion Program. Drs. Hongju Li and Qingzhe Zhai were awarded the title of Excellent Members of Youth Innovation Promotion Association of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2018.
To strengthen the application and commercialization of the research outputs, the Institute signed an agreement with Beijing Rong Sheng Nong Lv Co., Ltd to build a recycling system demonstration on feeding-stuff growing, breeding and feeding. Collaborated with DuPont Pioneer, the institute has got three international patents issued.
In 2018, the research work in the Centre of Excellence for Plant and Microbial Science (CEPAMS), jointly established by CAS and John Innes Centre, UK, carried out smoothly and its new recruited groups started to publish their works in the international leading journals, such as Nature Biotechnology. CEPAMS exhibited its progresses as a cooperation model in the Impact Festival & Gala Reception by UK Research and Innovation. Ten selected students attended the International Students Workshop, organized by the Nara Institute of Science and Technology in Japan and several international symposia were held in the institute, including the Frontiers in Genome Engineering 2018 and the 4th LipidALL International Lipid Symposium.
All these achievements and progresses are not possible without the efforts of IGDB staff and students. Thank you all for making this year very exciting and successful. Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to thank our sponsors and funding agencies for their enormous support. I am pleased to present this annual report and wish you a prosperous 2019.
