Center of Crop Genetics and Breeding

The Center for Crop Genetics and Breeding of the Institute of Crop Sciences, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS), closely aligns with the major national strategic demands for food security and critical scientific issues in agricultural production. It keeps pace with the global frontier of crop science and technology, focusing on crops such as wheat, corn, soybeans, and coarse cereals. Its key missions include deciphering the genetic mechanisms underlying the formation and regulation of important agronomic traits, innovating breeding theories, developing new breeding technologies and methods, establishing efficient breeding technology systems and supporting platforms, creating new germplasm with significant breeding value, and cultivating breakthrough crop varieties with high yield, good quality, multi-resistance, and high efficiency.

Through the organic integration of upstream, midstream, and downstream sectors as well as industry-academia-research collaboration, the center has formed a crop breeding industry development pattern characterized by "germplasm geneticization, gene technologization, and technology varietalization". This pattern greatly enhances China's innovation capabilities in crop genetic breeding and industrialization, providing strong scientific and technological support for safeguarding national food security, ecological security, and increasing farmers' income.

The Center comprises 10 innovative research groups and one Quality Inspection and Testing Center for Cereals under the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs. It has over 80 staff, including more than 30  professors and more than 30  associate professors.

The Center has made significant progress in the excavation of key crop genes as well as the theories and technologies of molecular breeding, and has published over 500 SCI papers in international mainstream journals such as Science and Nature Biotechnology. It has bred a number of breakthrough crop varieties like Zhonghuang 13 (soybean), Zhongmai 578 (wheat), and Zhongdan 808 (maize), which are promoted on an annual area of over 1.33 million hectares (equivalent to over 20 million mu). The Center has also won 4 first prizes and 4 second prizes of the National Science and Technology Progress Award, making outstanding contributions to safeguarding China's food security.