On June 20, the laboratory of CHEN Xin and TANG Jianjun at the College of Life Science,Zhejiang University,published an article entitled “Fish mediate surface soil methane oxidation in the agriculture heritage rice–fish system” in the journal Ecosystems. This study reveals how fish affect surface soil methane oxidation through foraging activities that cause trophic cascading and drive nitrogen recycling in the paddy ecosystem.Methane (CH4) emission is affected by the rates ...

According to the National Bureau of Statistics, approximately one in every five people in China is over 60 years old. This demographic shift towards an ageing population is posing great challenges on agriculture sector. A new study has quantified the impact of ageing through a set of data science research, providing the first explanation of the role of ageing in agriculture and solutions to address the issue. The results were published in Nature on February 22. How does rural ageing th...

According to the WHO’s ‘Estimates of the Global Burden of Foodborne Diseases’ report in 2015, approximately 600 million people (almost one in 10) worldwide fall ill from eating contaminated food annually; about 420,000 of these cases result in death each year. Moreover, the number of cases of illness caused by eating contaminated food continues to grow. As a result of globalized supply chains, food crosses numerous jurisdictions across many different interventions and stages, including p...

A plant-based dietary pattern is usually defined as a diet rich in plant-based foods and low level of animal-based foods, and has received accumulating attention for its potential health and environmental benefits. However, not all plant-based foods are necessarily beneficial to health, and most prior studies focused only on the western population, while there is limited evidence for the East Asian population  with a tradition of plant-based diet.On March 7, 2022, the research team led by D...

How does a cell develop into various types of tissues and organs with the same set of genome? Epigenetic modification patterns play a vital role in these processing. DNA methylation, a type of stably inheritable epigenetic modification, which is ubiquitous and conserved in both animals and plants, are essential for gene regulation, transposon silencing and gene imprinting. However, how DNA methylation patterns are regulated has remained obscure in the field of epigenetics.Recently, Assistant Pro...

Long-term hematopoietic stem cells (LT-HSCs) generate and maintain lifelong blood cell production through their self-renewal and multi-lineage capacity. In the steady state, this rare population of adult stem cells is quiescent, resulting in decreased reactive oxygen species (ROS) and thereby preserving genome integrity. Driving the quiescent HSCs into cycling due to physiological stress such as infection or chronic blood loss leads to a rapid increase in the levels of oxidative DNA damage, incl...

The real-time cumulative number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 throughout the world has exceeded 330 million with more than 5.5 million deaths, according to the statistics from Johns Hopkins University [1]. The global outbreak of the epidemic caused by SARS-CoV-2 has been lasting for more than two years, hitting hard nations all around the world. Under the current circumstance of the uncertainty in drug efficacy, vaccination is considered to be the most promising approach to contain the vir...

The use of natural enemies to control pests in agriculture is not only an environmentally-friendly and ecologically-safe biological control technology but also one of the important measures to ensure green vegetable production. Prof. CHEN Xuexin’s team has been committed to this field for the past 30 years and achieved a series of theoretical breakthroughs and technological innovations. This achievement earned him the second prize of the 2020 State Scientific and Technological Progress Award.In...

Black tea, which is fully fermented, is the most consumed tea in the world. While being processed, it has to undergo withering, rolling and fermentation, which causes complex biochemical reactions of the substances contained in tea leaves and ultimately gives birth to its unique flavor and health effect. Recently, the research team led by Prof. WANG Yuefei from the College of Agriculture and Biotechnology, Zhejiang University, has made a series of progress in terms of the quality formation ...

On December 13, Prof. JIAO Chen from the College of Agriculture and Biotechnology, Zhejiang University, and Prof. FEI Zhangjun from the Boyce Thompson Institute, Cornell University, co-published a research article entitled “Genomic analyses provide insights into spinach domestication and the genetic basis of agronomic traits” in the journal Nature Communications.Spinach is a remarkably nutritious leafy vegetable belonging to the Chenopodiaceae family. However, there has been a p...