Use-inspired research advances agricultural sustainability

Agriculture has long been the backbone of China, where one fifth of the world’s population is fed on 7% of its arable land. Although China’s agricultural reform and the development of science and technology have increased agricultural production, food security is still a big concern in China. Facing environmental challenges caused by fertilizer and pesticide application and differences in water availability and soil type, people find sustainability an urgent issue to be addressed for China and the world.

Focusing on sustainable development of agriculture in China, ZJU scholars in the Faculty of Agriculture, Life & Environment Sciences conduct use-inspired research on various factors in the agro-ecosystem to shed new light on these important practical questions.

Fertilization

Fertilization application has profound influence on soil health. Prof. XU Jianming’s team conducted the first global analysis of bacterial diversity and community composition after long-term N and NPK fertilization. Their results provide a useful reference for nutrient management strategies for maintaining belowground microbial diversity in agro-ecosystems worldwide.

Pest Management

Pests are the major enemy of agricultural production and one of the primary reasons for significant yield losses in China.

An international research team led by three ZJU scientists offers novel insights on the regulation of serotonin biosynthesis in rice as a defensive mechanism upon insect infestation. Rice with CYP71A1 gene mutation confers less insect-susceptibility, which may prove valuable for breeding insect-resistant cultivars of rice and other cereal crops.

Another team led by Prof. ZHANG Chuanxi zooms in on genomic, transcriptomic, and proteomic patterns of cuticular proteins in the arthropods of the brown planthopper, a major rice plant pest. Their findings may further stimulate the design and development of insecticides specifically targeting cuticle proteins.

Water

Water scarcity represents the most severe constraint to agriculture. Using state-of-art genome sequencing technologies, Prof. ZHOU Guoping et al. identify genes with significant roles in plant drought tolerance, which may be useful for crop improvement, particularly for breeding of barley cultivars with high drought tolerance.