Stomata are pores in the leaf epidermis that play a crucial role in plants. They allow CO2 uptake for photosynthetic carbon assimilation at the expense of water loss via transpiration. Efforts to improve plant water use efficiency (WUE) have focused on reducing stomatal density, despite its implicit penalty in carbon assimilation. Approaches to reducing transpiration without incurring a cost for photosynthesis must circumvent this inherent coupling of carbon dioxide and water vapor dif...

From April 7-10, Prof. CHEN Xuexin, dean of the College of Agriculture and Biotechnology (CAB) led a delegation to Pakistan. An MOU signing ceremony between ZJU and University of Agriculture Faisalabad, Pakistan's top agricultural university was held, which is witnessed by H.E. Mr. Yao Jing, China's Ambassador to Pakistan, and H.E. Dr. Syed Safdar Ali Shah, Director-General (CPEC), Higher Education Commission, Pakistan. At the signing ceremony, the Ambassador H.E. Mr. Yao Jing ...

Autophagy is a lysosomal degradative pathway essential to development and homeostasis. The deregulation of autophagy is tightly associated with a variety of human diseases. Studies have shown that the biogenesis of autophagosomes needs membranes from multiple sources, including ER, the Golgi network, mitochondria, the endosomes and ER-Golgi intermediate. It remains elusive as to how the membranes from different sources are directionally delivered for the formation and expansion of a ph...

Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), the world’s largest, international higher education network, made an official announcement that ZJU's School of Management was rated as a 5 Stars institution through rigorous and independent data collection and analysis of performance metrics as set out in the QS StarsTM methodology. It is another accreditation that the School of Management has received after AACSB, EQUIS, AMBA, CAMEA and CEEMAN IQA.QS is best known for publishing the QS World ...

The research team led by FENG Youjun at the School of Medicine has made major breakthroughs in research into the mechanism behind mobile colistin resistance (MCR) recently. Their findings were published in two articles in Advanced Science on April 3, 2019.Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) has become one of the biggest threats to global health, food security, and social development, particularly in developing countries, including China and India. The emergence and expeditiou...

New majors will fill educational gap and meet growing workforce needs.China will launch around 400 programs related to big data, artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics in universities in 2019, China’s Ministry of Education announced recently. From this fall, Zhejiang University will offer two new undergraduate programs in robotics engineering and AI, which will meet a growing workforce need for more robotics engineers and AI scientists both locally and globally. Meanwhile, Turing Class in th...

Radioactive tracers are needed during the Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scan, a nuclear medicine functional imaging technique. Dependent on what to detect, different ligands are used for different imaging purposes, including the measurement of glucose metabolic rate, the quantification of cardiac perfusion or the determination of gene expression. Up to date, there are more than 100 tracers that have been designed and this number keeps increasing. However, the synthesis of PET...

A genetic compensation mechanism discovered in zebrafish could open up new prospects in the treatment of genetic disorders, a recent study suggests.The study by Prof. CHEN Jun from the College of Life Sciences and Prof. PENG Jinrong from the College of Animal Sciences, “PTC-bearing mRNA elicits a genetic compensation response via Upf3a and COMPASS components,” appeared in Nature.First let’s go back to 2015, in which Prof. PENG’s team has observed phenotypic discrepancies betwe...

Recently, the research team led by ZHENG Yinfei, an associate professor in the Institute of Medical and Health Information Engineering, Zhejiang University, proposed a novel imaging technology based on ultrasound materials and a plane wave imaging method—transcranial ultrasound imaging. This technology breaks through the “no-go zone” in cranial imaging and opens the door to human transcranial ultrasound imaging.A modern ultrasound machine detects tissue structures and the flow of blood by anal...

Last Friday (April 5) is the Qingming Festival in China. This is a traditional Chinese holiday with a history of more than 2500 years. Chinese people traditionally visit ancestral tombs and clean the gravesites on this day. Another Qingming ritual is to eat Qingtuan, which is made of glutinous rice mixed with Chinese mugwort or barley grass.Owing to the color of the plant, traditional Qingtuan is green. Now more varieties are available at ZJU cafeterias to satisfy diverse tastes. ...