Sino-US Crop Molecular Breeding Joint Laboratory

Director: Professor Jun Zhu

Associate director: Professor Longjiang Fan

Sino-US Crop Molecular Breeding Joint Laboratory was established in 2010, organized by ZheJiang University, North Carolina State University, University of Virginia and Yunnan Tobacco Agricultural Research Institue, etc. The lab is dedicated to integrating the advantages of genomics and bioinformatics information of ZheJiang University and the research on crops, especially tobacco of the U.S. With these, molecular biology and genomics can then be applied to crop's molecular breeding, such as new type molecular marker development, genetic map construction, QTL mapping, and functional gene cloning and so on. As an important research direction, how to reduce the harm caused by cigarette and advocate environment-friendly tobacco is an urgent research task in China. Therefore, the laboratory is devoted to tobacco molecular assisted breeding. As we know, it's really an important way to obtain tobacco varieties, such as that with low nicotine and low tar, through genetic modification and breeding in tobacco. But now with the rapid development of modern genomics and molecular biology technology, people have been able to analyze individual's genetic makeup from the molecular level quickly and accurately, and this provides a possibility for realizing harm-reduction breeding selection on the tobacco genome.

The main research areas of the joint laboratory are:
1、 Genomes of crops and evolutionary research
2、 Genomic big data-based breeding techniques
3、 Analysis of tobacco genome and the construction of bioinformatics platform
4、 Cloning of genes related to the synthesis of Nicotine, tar and other harmful components in tobacco and evaluation of Smoking safety