On May 6th, the Qingdao Sea-rice Research and Development Center was inaugurated in the Qingdao International Academician Park located in Licang District, Qingdao. Yuan Longping, the world-renowned rice research specialist and a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering will assume the post of center director. He will lead his research and development team to focus on the saline-alkaline tolerating rice breeding and saline-alkali soil rice planting improvement and cultivate high-yield sea-rice varieties suitable for mass promotion and planting.

    Located inside the Bai Ni Di Park, the R &D and Experiment Base of the center occupy an area of 40 mu. The lab covers an area of 4,200 square meters and there are 12 plots for experiment. Currently field experiment has been carried out comprehensively and the experimental varieties have been planted. Part of the lab has been completed in the main structure. It is expected to put the lab into use in the next half of this year.

    The Qingdao Sea-rice Research and Development Center has set up three research and development directions including saline-alkaline tolerating rice breeding and saline-alkali soil rice planting improvement, sterile line hybrid rice technology of the third generation of genetic engineering, and rice quality and taste research. It is planned to build the center into the key national saline-alkaline tolerating rice lab and national sea-rice engineering and technological research center,标点

    Currently this center has undertaken the 1st international sea-rice forum, taken the initiative to establish the national sea-rice industry alliance and led to formulate national trial standard of saline-alkaline tolerating rice. It aims to transform saline and alkaline land and intertidal zone within 5 to 10 years by utilizing rice planting improvement technology and increase 100 million mu fertile farmland for China that can produce 30 billion kgs more grain on the annual basis.

    In terms of the sterile line hybrid rice technology of the third generation of genetic engineering, the center has carried out sterile line improvement and overall matching. The third generation technology will be applied to the total 3 billion mu farmland in the world and the international breeding cooperation will be conducted to endeavor to utilize the “made-in-China” hybrid rice technology in over 1 billion mu farmland within 5 to 10 years.

    In terms of rice quality and taste research, the center has commenced to build up an all-life-cycle quality and taste software and hardware research platform including rice gene pedigree research, soil melioration, seed manure and plant protection research, rice drying and storage, processing and milling, and the water and rice ratio during cooking and cooking curve study. In addition, it will adopt the intelligent cooking terminal, construct the national or even global rice cooking big data cloud platform and build up the first distributed rice taste internet+ research platform in the world. Zhang Hua