Center of Crop Advanced Interdisciplinary Technology

Center for Crop Advanced Interdisciplinary Technology is a newly established internal research unit within the Institute of Crop Science of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences in 2024. It comprises 7 innovative research groups and has 24 formal research staff (including 12 senior researchers, 8 associate researchers, and 4 assistant researchers), four of whom are nationally recognized talents.

Positioning: The center focuses on cutting-edge interdisciplinary fields, establishing technology support platforms for big data and AI-driven design, crop genetic transformation, gene editing, and synthetic biology. It aims to enhance the integrated application of emerging biotechnologies and artificial intelligence, accelerate the development of new interdisciplinary fields, and support the industrialization of biological breeding.

Development Goals: Targeting crops such as corn, soybean, wheat, rice, and coarse cereals, the center aims to support the creation of new germplasm resources, gene and molecular design, and breeding and seed industry technologies. Its goals are to seize the high ground in frontier technologies, establish the Institute as a domestic and international demonstration base for crop gene editing and R&D and application of advanced technologies, and solidify and enhance the innovation capacity of biological breeding both within the Institute and across China.

Research Directions include new genetic transformation technologies, gene editing technologies, chromosome engineering and synthetic biology, multi-omics bioinformatics and artificial intelligence, creation of new germplasm and genetic resources, development of new varieties (lines) and innovation and application of breeding technologies.

Notable Achievements: Breakthroughs in overcoming genotype limitations in genetic transformation of crops such as rice and wheat; development of novel doubled haploid systems and second- and third-generation hybrid seed production technologies; construction of multi-species, multi-omics databases, completion of telomere-to-telomere (T2T) genomes for foxtail millet and sorghum, and the first high-quality graph-based pan-genome for a C4 crop; proposal of a novel three-category classification system for foxtail millet, elucidating the origin of broomcorn millet; establishment of efficient identification and biosynthesis technologies for crop insect-resistant compounds. Related achievements have been published in leading journals such as Nature Genetics and Molecular Plant.