Yuping Lu
DBN Biotech Center, Beijing, China

China is seeking innovation-driven development patterns toadjust its industrial structures and to achieve sustainable growth. Development of new strategic industries is no doubt an important and efficient measure. Innovations in biotechnology, as one of the national strategic emerging industries, will definitely optimize biotech-related industries and upgrade the Chinese transformation of economic growth mode. Biotech-breeding which integrates biotechnology with traditional seed breeding industry is a new technique that will boost Chinese agriculture.
In today’s global resource-constrained settings, China experiences predicaments: lower and lower cereals and oils self-sufficiency, more and more frequently occurring drought and saline environment, and increasing disease losses due to pest resistance to chemicals, etc. Using innovations to deploy modern production pipelines and to achieve new technology breakthroughs becomes the core driving force of agriculture development and the weapon to defense threats to our national cereals and oils.
Biotech-breeding is a comprehensive breeding technique that includes elite germplasm resource discovery and assessment, genetic modified breeding and molecular marker-assisted breeding. The production pipeline is market oriented, from the upstream gene discovery, evaluation and optimization, through gene transformation and event selection, to the downstream regulatory assessment and excellent trait integration, then finally to a new variety. Molecular marker-assisted breeding technique, featured as cloudy data, plays an important role through the whole production line and accelerates the breeding speed dramatically, particularly in transgenic event selection, trait integration and variety selection. Majority Chinese seed breeding companies lack core techniques in biotech breeding and are not comparable with multinational corporations. This report using insect-resistant, herbicide tolerant and drought resistant maize R&D process as examples, elaborates how DBN Biotech Center has applied innovations in biotech breeding thatdrive the development of agriculture in China.