Center for Genomic Studies on Plant-Environment Interaction
for Sustainable Agriculture and Food Security
| Coordinating University: | The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Prof. Hon Ming Lam) |
| Participating Universities: | The University of Hong Kong, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong Baptist University |
| Total Funding Approved: | HK$81.156M |
| Indicative Project Time-Frame: | 2017 – 2025 |
Introduction
Water scarcity, global warming and topsoil depletion are among the major factors hampering sustainable agriculture and food security. The Centre for Genomic Studies on Plant-Environment Interaction for Sustainable Agriculture and Food Security (The Center) comprises of a strong team of local, mainland and international researchers from notable institutes, who is committed to investigating the underlying mechanisms of plant-environment interactions and developing new plant and agricultural technology to strike a better balance between sustainable agriculture and food security, by answering a central question: “How do plants interact with their environment?”
Central Question: How do plants interact with their environment?
The focus of the center’s research is to understand how plants adapt to abiotic stresses such as drought, salinity and heat, and how plants interact with microbes, by integrating genomics and genetics, molecular biology and biochemistry, and stress physiology studies. Soybean was chosen as the primary crop model due to its importance in sustainable agriculture, our previous successes in soybean genomic studies, the availability of our in-house soybean genomic sequence database, unique germplasms and genetic populations.
This upstream research aims to understand the genetic and epigenetic regulatory mechanisms on a genome-wide scale. The valuable genomic information will be disseminated to researchers and crop breeders. New knowledge and technologies acquired through the proposed research can then be applied to other crops in delineating the underlying mechanisms of plant-environment interactions.