Plant molecular biology in China: Opportunities and challenges

In the 21st century, mankind has witnessed great advances in life sciences, including completion of the Arabidopsis thaliana genome sequence and major advances with the rice genome. But, along with global economic development, urbanization, and depletion of natural resources, many serious problems are emerging (for example, environment, food, population, energy), which reinforce the need for sustainable development in many countries and in many institutions and prompt progress in life sciences globally. Plants offer the globe its only renewable resource of food, building material, and energy. Plants have highly sophisticated, concerted, short- and long-term adaptive mechanisms to the environment. Plants have great importance in global sustainable economic development. Plant molecular biology is a most essential and powerful tool in this process. Globally, plant molecular biology research is progressing rapidly, from use of model plants to cereal crops and from cellular processes to evolutionary mechanisms. Results of these studies have value in ecosystem regulation and environmental phytoremediation. China is a large agricultural country with one-fifth of the world's population. The gap for the level of plant molecular biology research in China is large, compared with that in other developed nations. However, some Chinese laboratories (notably those of academicians Jiayang Li, Zhihong Xu, Zhensheng Li, Mengmin Hong, Qifa Zhang and professors Yongbiao Xue, Shouyi Chen, and Zhen Zhu) have kept pace with international developments in plant molecular biology. How to fully utilize plant biodiversity in China requires future advances in plant molecular biology. This minireview discusses opportunities and challenges in plant molecular biology in China, analyzes the current status of international plant molecular biology, and provides suggestions to accelerate and advance international efforts.