Our center was founded in 2001, Oct 8th. The former UK science minister and the former deputy mayor of Shanghai attended the opening ceremony. The center is a collaboration of Fudan university, SJTU and the University of Nottingham and the first international institution co-built between sino- and UK- universities in plant biotechnology. The director of the center is Kexuan Tang Professor who is awarded the “ChangJiang Scholar” title. The academic committee member consists of Prof. Cocking of the University of Nottingham, the President of Peiking University, academician Prof Zhihong Xu of the China Scientific Academy, as well as another 10 well-known experts; The center focus on studying plant bioreactor, plant secondary metabolic engineering, plant gene expression and regulation, and bioinformatics, 1) Molecular Farming. To engineer secondary metabolic pathways to improve the yield and quality of medicinal plants such as terpenoids including anti-malaria drug artemisinin and anti-cancer drug vinblastine. 2) Crop improvement. To engineer crops for improved quality and quantity such as for enhanced insect resistance and for improving nutritional quality (such as vitamins in lettuce). Now there are 11 staffs and 34 PhD and master students in the center, among which one is “ChangJiang Scholar” titled professor, two professors, 4 associate professors, 3 assistant professors and 1 technician. After more than 14 year efforts, the center has greatly developed and obtained wide reputation in the field of plant molecular biology in China.

Under the lead of Prof. Tang, the center got over 20 research projects including China National “863” High-Tech Project, China Transgenic Plant Research and Commercialization Project, China National “973” Basic Research Program Project, Shanghai Science and Technology Committee Project, Sino-UK Collaborative project to work on plant bioreactor, plant metabolic engineering, gene cloning and transgenic plants.

Our center has published more than 140 papers in the international journals, including PNAS and Bioinformatics, and applied more than 60 patents in China. We successfully expressed the important proteins of pharmaceutical and clinical use in tomato, lettuce, tobacco and cole. Our center developed the mature and efficent transgenic platform for a variety of plants (Artermisia, Catharanthus, lettuce, tomato, cotton), which help us to get transgenic Artemisia annua plants with enhanced artemisinin contents and transgenic Catharanthus roseus with increased vinblastine contents, the first GM medicinal plants in the world in the field trial stage. He has developed transgenic lettuce enriched in multi vitamins which may result in the first GM transgenic leafy vegetable crops in the world. To investigation the regulation and biosynthesis machenism of these important natural products, Our center is capable to do the yeast one hybrid, yeast two hybrid, double fluorescence complementation，