About Gansu Academy of Sciences

Gansu Academy of Sciences

The Gansu Academy of Sciences (Chinese: 甘肃省科学院) is Gansu province's research academy, based in Lanzhou, the provincial capital, and publishing under the gsas.ac.cn domain. Its verified record spans two of northwest China's defining research problems. The first is biological: the medicinal plants and microbial resources of an arid region, studied by its Institute of Biology through the Key Laboratory of Microbial Resources Exploitation and Application of Gansu Province. The second is geological: the landslides of the thick loess deposits of eastern Gansu, mapped and modelled by its Geological Hazards Prevention Institute in a European Community partnership programme that began in 1987 and helped define the field of loess landslide science. The academy also includes an Institute of Nanomaterials Application Technology and a Natural Energy Research Institute among its attested units.

Gansu is a long, dry corridor province — loess plateau in the east, desert and mountains in the west — and both halves of the academy's profile follow from that geography. Aridity makes its medicinal-plant and microbial resources distinctive; loess makes its slopes among the most landslide-prone on earth.

Identity and institutes

The academy is the Gansu provincial government's general research academy, headquartered in Lanzhou. Its institutes appear as affiliations across the international literature: the Institute of Biology in Lanzhou 730000; the Geological Hazards Research Institute — now the Geological Hazards Prevention Institute — also in Lanzhou; and, recorded in its directory entry, institutes for nanomaterials application technology and natural energy research, together with a sensor technology institute attested in Chinese institutional listings. Research is funded through the academy's own instruments as well as national ones: its published papers acknowledge a Key Research and Development Project of the Gansu Academy of Sciences and an Industrialization Application Project of the Gansu Academy of Sciences alongside National Natural Science Foundation of China grants.

That funding pattern — national foundation grants layered over academy-level key and industrialisation projects — is typical of China's stronger provincial academies, and it shows in the output: the academy's biologists publish in international plant-science and materials journals, while its hazards institute's work is cited in the foundational literature of loess geohazards.

Institute of Biology and the microbial resources laboratory

The Institute of Biology hosts the Key Laboratory of Microbial Resources Exploitation and Application of Gansu Province, the platform named on its recent papers. The laboratory's work treats the arid northwest's microorganisms as a resource to be prospected: strains isolated from extreme or specialised environments — frozen soil, medicinal-plant rhizospheres, animal rumens — are characterised and developed for agriculture, energy and materials.

A characteristic example is the biocontrol fungus Pythium oligandrum, isolated by institute researchers from the rhizosphere soil of Chinese angelica, a signature Gansu medicinal crop. The same organism anchors an unexpected second line of work described below: institute researchers carbonised Pythium oligandrum biomass combined with graphene oxide into a photocatalyst material, linking the microbial collection directly to energy materials research. The institute maintains a testing base at Heping, Longnan, used as the experimental site for its medicinal-plant field trials.

Medicinal plants of the arid northwest

Medicinal-plant science is the institute's applied core. A 2025 study in Frontiers in Plant Science, authored from the Key Laboratory, examined how exogenous phytohormones enhance the biomass of Paris polyphylla var. chinensis — a high-value medicinal plant — by regulating antioxidant systems and rhizosphere microbial subcommunities, with field work at the academy's Heping testing base in Longnan. The study found, among other effects, that melatonin treatment significantly increased the relative abundance of Proteobacteria such as Serratia and Pseudomonas in the rhizosphere, tying plant performance to the microbial community the laboratory exists to exploit.

The institute also researches liquorice (Glycyrrhiza uralensis) cultivation in saline-alkali soils, as recorded in its directory entry — a problem squarely aimed at Gansu's degraded drylands, where a salt-tolerant medicinal crop can make marginal land productive. Together, the angelica, Paris polyphylla and liquorice work describes a consistent programme: the cultivation science of the northwest's medicinal flora, down to the microbes in its root zone.

Microbial biotechnology: hydrogen, cellulose and straw

The institute's strain-development record is documented in Chinese patents as well as papers. It is the assignee of a patent for an anaerobic fungus, a Piromyces species (CY1) isolated from the rumen of the yak-cattle hybrid known as pian cattle, which degrades rice straw by fermentation while producing hydrogen — exploiting the rumen's evolved, highly efficient lignocellulose-degrading enzyme system for bioenergy. In 2025 the institute filed a patent for a highly efficient cellulose-degrading strain, Corynascus verrucosus F19-1 (deposit CCTCC No: M 20251389), derived from frozen soil, reporting degradation of corn straw at 56.90 percent for cellulose, 35.22 percent for hemicellulose and 18.71 percent for lignin, with a straw weight-loss rate of 39.93 percent — strain resources offered for the high-value conversion of agricultural biomass.

The materials end of that pipeline is equally concrete. Institute researchers prepared a Pythium oligandrum-derived carbon/graphene oxide nanohybrid as a sensitising substrate for dye-sensitised photocatalytic hydrogen evolution, reporting activity 1.3 and 2.1 times higher than the graphene-oxide and biomass-carbon controls respectively, and an apparent quantum efficiency of 32.2 percent at 430 nanometres. A fungus collected for biocontrol thus reappears as a solar-fuel material — the clearest illustration of the laboratory's "exploitation and application" brief.

Geological Hazards Prevention Institute and the loess landslides

The academy's Geological Hazards Prevention Institute — formerly the Geological Hazards Research Institute — holds a distinctive place in the history of geohazard science. In 1987 the Gansu Academy of Sciences, for the Gansu Provincial Government in Lanzhou, and research institutes in Britain, France, the Netherlands and Greece, for the European Community, began a joint research programme to map, monitor, analyse and model the landslides of eastern Gansu. The Gansu Geological Hazards Research Institute was in charge of the field and air-photo mapping — at scales of 1:100,000, 1:35,000 and 1:10,000 — stratigraphical logging, climatological data, geotechnical testing and research into ancient literary sources, while the European consultants contributed medium- and large-scale landslide mapping, sedimentology, geomorphological and geotechnical mapping, groundwater regime studies, water tracing and work on past and present land utilisation.

The programme's scientific monument is the Wiley volume Landslides in the Thick Loess Terrain of North-West China, whose structure mirrors the partnership: loess as a geological material, loess and water, shear strength of Lanzhou loess, loess slope instability, and landslide hazard modelling. The problem it addressed has few equals: the loess of the Lanzhou region reaches thicknesses of up to 380 metres of weakly cemented wind-blown silt overlying impermeable argillite, with the upper 20 to 35 metres of collapsible Malan loess; high relief, intensive seasonal monsoonal rainfall and active seismicity combine, in the words of the institute's later conference work, to yield a landslide concentration scarcely matched anywhere else on earth. The institute's researchers continued that case-study tradition into the European Geosciences Union literature, assessing terrain instability and landslide control on the Yellow River terraces around Lanzhou, where forty years of cultivation on the third and fourth terraces intensified the hazard.

The Lanzhou terraces: a continuing case study

The hazards institute's loess work did not end with the European partnership. In a case study presented to the European Geosciences Union, researchers of the academy's Geological Hazards Research Institute, with Lanzhou University colleagues, assessed terrain instability and landslide control on the loess terraces of the Lanzhou region — specifically a fourth terrace of the Yellow River near the city. Their abstract sets out why the site matters: disasters arising from terrain instability are frequent in northwest China, where high relative relief, intensive seasonal monsoonal rainfall and active seismicity act on loess deposits up to 380 metres thick, and where the development of industry and agriculture in the greater Lanzhou region over the preceding forty years witnessed an intensification and expansion of cultivation onto the third and fourth terraces of the Yellow River.

The material science in that study is precise: the top 20 to 35 metres of Malan loess — late Pleistocene wind-blown silt — is characterised by a high voids ratio and collapsibility, the properties that make loess slopes fail when wetted. Assessment and control work of this kind, on the terraces of the provincial capital itself, is the direct descendant of the 1987 programme's mapping at 1:10,000 scale, and it keeps the academy's hazards institute at the centre of land-use safety decisions in the Lanzhou region.

Natural energy and nanomaterials

Two further units widen the academy's brief beyond biology and geology. Its Natural Energy Research Institute works the energy side of a province rich in wind and solar resources, while its Institute of Nanomaterials Application Technology covers applied materials — a combination that makes the biomass-carbon photocatalysis work of the Institute of Biology legible as part of an academy-wide energy-materials interest rather than an isolated result. The academy runs its own key research and development and industrialisation programmes across these units, as its directory record notes.

Sensing technology and the sensor laboratory

A further attested unit gives the academy a distinct applied-physics strand: the Institute of Sensing Technology in Lanzhou 730000, which hosts the Key Laboratory of Sensor and Sensing Technology of Gansu Province. Its researchers work on gas sensors, biosensors and energy materials. In gas sensing, institute co-authors contributed to a study of indium-doped zinc oxide derived from the metal-organic framework ZIF-8, in which 1 percent indium doping produced a hollow nanocage material whose response to 100 ppm ethanol at 328 degrees Celsius reached 313.8, offered as a reference point for detecting ethanol leakage. In biosensing, the laboratory is the home affiliation on work on a magnetic and fluorescent nanocomposite probe for detecting matrix metalloproteinase-2 in cells.

The same laboratory's materials work reaches into energy storage and conversion. Its researchers co-authored a Nano Research study of lithium-rich manganese-based cathodes in which an oxygen-deficient lithium niobate surface coating acted as a physical barrier suppressing lattice oxygen release, retaining 83.3 percent of capacity after 500 cycles at 5C, with support that included a Gansu Academy of Sciences major project. Other institute work includes photoelectrocatalytic carbon dioxide reduction using a three-dimensional indium sulfide/cadmium sulfide heterojunction, and an MXene-enhanced hydrogel strain sensor for wearable electronics with a stable response over a 1 to 450 percent strain range and a response time of 0.4 seconds — a breadth that makes the sensing institute, rather than a minor adjunct, one of the academy's main publication engines.

Place in Gansu's research system

The Gansu Academy of Sciences is the provincial government's general research academy for Gansu, distinct from the province's specialist agricultural and forestry academies and from the Chinese Academy of Sciences institutes that also sit in Lanzhou, such as the Lanzhou Institute of Chemical Physics. Its official website is gsas.ac.cn.

For this directory, the academy is recorded as a Lanzhou-based provincial academy whose verified record centres on the Institute of Biology and its Key Laboratory of Microbial Resources Exploitation and Application — medicinal plants, biocontrol and biomass-degrading strains, and biomass-derived energy materials — and on the Geological Hazards Prevention Institute, whose 1987 European Community partnership on the landslides of eastern Gansu made it a founding institution of loess landslide science, with nanomaterials and natural energy institutes completing its attested structure.