On February 6, 2015, Prof. Wan Jianmin, world-famous expert in rice molecular genetics and breeding, veteran in superior rice gene mining and molecular breeding research, one of the first distinguished professors of Yangtze Scholar Project launched by the Ministry of Education, current Director of Institute of Crop Sciences, CAAS, paid a visit to our School, during which he visited Deng Xingwang’s laboratory, Qu Lijia’s laboratory, GuHongya’s Laboratory and gave a lecture as part of the Advanced agriculture lecture series of Peking University.

The topic of Prof. Wan Jianmin’s lecture was “Molecular breeding research on heterosis of indica-japonica cross of rice”. In the lecture, he pointed out that molecular design and directive breeding have been preliminarily made possible by clarifying the genotypes of heading time of species in various rice-producing zones in China and analyzing ecological conditions of light intensity and temperature in different regions. By utilizing heading time genes, the growth time problem of hybrid has been solved; by exploring for new dominant semi-dwarf genes, the height of hybrid is effectively controlled within 100-120cm; through mining for larger numbers of hybrid sterility genes, finding out corresponding wide compatibility gene locus for pyramiding and enabling site-directed mutual substitution of indica-japonica segments with molecular markers, a new variety of light- and temperature-sensitive sterile rice japonica has been bred, hence providing a feasible approach for utilizing the advantage of heterosis of indica-japonica cross of rice.