Bulletin No. 1, 2011

36   Chinese University Bulletin No. 1, 2011 Returning Soybeans to Their Roots O ne of the earliest accounts of the cultivation of soybeans can be found in the Book of Songs , a 3,000-year-old collection of Chinese poems. Today, the US is the world’s largest soybean producer, producing 80 million tons annually. By contrast, China, the homeland of soybeans cannot produce enough for domestic consumption and, in 2009, had to purchase close to US$10 billion worth of the crop from the US. Prof. Samuel S.M. Sun (left), director of the State Key Laboratory of Agrobiotechnology at CUHK (SKL–CUHK), says, ‘Soybeans from the US are pampered by fertilizers, herbicide and pesticide.’ To toughen them up, the laboratory has launched ‘Homecoming of Soybeans’, a project aimed at restoring the genomic information of soybeans lost during the process of domestication, in order to improve their stress tolerance and to make them suitable for growing in more areas in China. The project, a collaboration with the Beijing Genomics Institute–Shenzhen, has made major breakthroughs, including decoding the genomes of 17 wild and 14 cultivated soybean accessions and revealing their differences. Wild soybeans have higher genomic diversity than cultivated soybeans. Professor Sun adds, ‘China has 22% of the world’s population, but only 7% of its farmland. We’re concerned about the issue of the country’s food security in the future.’ That is why the laboratory has devoted efforts to improving the yield, quality and stress tolerance of rice and soybean, two staple crops of the Chinese. The research team led by Prof. Lam Hon-ming (right), deputy director, SKL–CUHK, has already identified anti-drought and anti- saline soybean lines and carried out field tests on them in arid regions in North-western China and on saline lands in Northern China. With the new genome sequencing data, he hopes that these soybean lines can be put to greater use. The ‘Homecoming of Soybeans’ project is jointly supported by the University Grants Committee’s Areas of Excellence Scheme, the Hong Kong Research Grants Council General Research Fund, and CUHK. Research in soybeans has aroused public attention. The K.S. Lo Foundation made a generous donation in 2010 to CUHK for endowing a research fund to support soybean studies. The findings of the soybean genome sequencing were published as the cover story in the December 2010 issue of Nature Genetics , the top journal on genetics.