Centre for Plant and Agricultural Biotechnology

Funding approved: HK$63.82M

Indicative project time-frame: 2000–2011

Food shortage is a pressing problem in developing countries around the world. It was the mission of this project to increase crop production and enhance quality (by, for example, improving nutritional value and increasing stress tolerance) through biotechnology. The project team also attempted to generate value-added products from crop plants. The strategy of the project was to build a pipeline for biotechnology crop production by identifying useful genes from elite germplasms, transferring those genes into designated crops (e.g., rice) to produce new lines, conducting field trials and safety assessment, and finally delivering a set of parental lines for agricultural production.