Areas of Excellence

Water scarcity, global warming and topsoil depletion are among the major factors hampering sustainable agriculture and food security. The AoE Centre for Genomic Studies on Plant-Environment Interaction for Sustainable Agriculture and Food Security, consisting of local, mainland and international researchers from notable institutions, is committed to investigating underlying mechanisms of plant-environment interactions and developing new plant and agricultural technology to strike a better balance between sustainable agriculture and food security.

Soybean has been chosen as the primary crop plant due to its importance in sustainable agriculture, previous successes in soybean genomic studies, availability of the soybean genomic sequence database, unique germplasms and genetic populations. The research project aims to unleash the full potential of soybean in recovering the agroecological system, thereby increasing the global production and consumption of beans and attaining agricultural sustainability. The team proposes to make use of the state-of-the-art technology in genomic study, molecular biology, biochemistry and cell biology to investigate the mechanisms of soybean-environment interaction. It hopes that the new knowledge and technologies acquired can respond to climate change and ultimately apply to other crops.