Horticultural Crop Germplasm

The team, led by Professor Deng Xiuxin, a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, consists of 17 members, including Kuang Hanhui, the Yangtze River Scholar, Guo Wenwu, the Yangtze River Scholar and the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholar, Liu Jihong, Ye Zhibiao, Cheng Yunjiang, Xu Qiang et al. The team was funded by Innovation grant from the Hubei Province Natural Science Foundation in 2004 and an Innovation grant from the Ministry of Education in 2005 and funded as the Creative Research Group of the National Natural Science Foundation of China three consecutive times in 2009-2018. Now the team has 4 stable research directions, namely, the discovery, evaluation, and conservation of germplasm resources of horticultural plants, germplasm innovation, and genetic improvement, molecular bases of the formation and regulation of fruit quality, molecular biology of disease resistance, and stress resistance.

The team has discovered a number of essential germplasm resources of citrus, including the monoembryonic ecotype of Fortune/la hindsii swingle, an annual citrus species, and naturally somatic mutants with different fruit colors. The team has created the first double haploid lines of sweet orange and finished the mapping and annotation of the sweet orange genome, which is the first genome published in Rutaceae. Genes crucial for citrus important agronomic traits such as polyembryony, fruit color, resistance, etc. have been identified and their regulatory mechanisms elucidated. The results were published in Nature Genetics, Plant Physiology, etc..