About South Subtropical Crops Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Tropical Agricultural Sciences

South Subtropical Crops Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Tropical Agricultural Sciences

The South Subtropical Crops Research Institute (SSCRI) of the Chinese Academy of Tropical Agricultural Sciences (CATAS) is China's only national public research institute for south subtropical crops. Based in Zhanjiang, Guangdong Province, it was founded in January 1954 as the Xuwen Experimental Station, relocated to Zhanjiang in 1958, and took its present name in 1987, becoming a national non-profit research institute in October 2002. It conserves more than 2,600 accessions of tropical crops and is China's biggest germplasm resources keeper for mango, pineapple and sisal, serving rural and agricultural development across the whole south subtropical region.

History: from Xuwen Experimental Station to national institute

The institute was established in Xuwen County, Zhanjiang, Guangdong Province, in January 1954 and was called the Xuwen Experimental Station at that time. Upon relocating to Zhanjiang City in 1958, it was renamed the Yuexi Experimental Station. In 1987 the Yuexi Experimental Station was replaced by the South Subtropical Crops Research Institute. In October 2002 SSCRI was listed as a national non-profit research institute, as part of the results of the national research institutes management system reform. That seventy-year trajectory — from a county experimental station serving the Leizhou Peninsula to a national institute of the Chinese Academy of Tropical Agricultural Sciences — frames its present mandate: based in Zhanjiang, it services the whole south subtropical area for rural development, agricultural development and farmer benefit.

Service regions

The institute's key service areas reach well beyond its home city. They are the dry-hot region of the Jinsha River in Sichuan and Yunnan provinces, the river valley region of the Youjiang in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, the Zhanjiang area of the Leizhou Peninsula in Guangdong Province, and the Dehong area of Yunnan Province. These are the zones in which its varieties and technologies — above all its late-ripening mango work in the dry-hot Jinsha River valley — are demonstrated and extended, and they define the institute as a regional research provider for south subtropical agriculture rather than a purely local station.

Mandate and research areas

SSCRI is mandated to perform basic, applied basic and common key-technology-oriented applied research on economically important crops of the south subtropical regions. Its work focuses on germplasm resources and genetic breeding, cultivation and physiology, post-harvest storage and preservation, effective utilisation of agricultural resources, and environmental protection. Its stated key research areas are the innovative use of germplasm resources and genetic breeding; the physiology and cultivation of crops; south subtropical agricultural resource utilisation and environment management; and post-harvest physiology and storage technology. In the decade covered by its official profile it undertook over 50 national projects and completed more than 120 science and technology achievements, including five national awards and 22 provincial and ministerial awards, and held 44 patents.

Germplasm conservation

The institute currently conserves over 2,600 accessions of tropical crops collected domestically and from abroad. It is the biggest mango, pineapple and sisal germplasm resources keeper in China. That conservation role underpins the wider CATAS achievement in the innovative utilisation of characteristic tropical crop germplasm: through 30 years of selection and breeding, CATAS brought about 34 new varieties and established corresponding cultivation technology systems including seedling production, widely grown across five provinces of South China on planting areas of about 1.2 million hectares — an achievement that won the second prize of the State Science and Technology Progress Award in 2012. SSCRI's collections provide the raw material from which such varieties are bred and against which new introductions are evaluated.

Mango research and the late-mango industry belt

Mango is the institute's signature crop. In cooperation with local institutions and farmers, SSCRI developed key technology for late-mango production and brought about new mango varieties including CATAS No. 1, CATAS No. 2, R2E2 and the Zillate late-maturing variety. Its researchers found methods to control mango anthracnose, solved the problem of on- and off-year (alternate) bearing, and resolved a series of key technical problems in mango production. With its late-ripening mango varieties the institute has boosted the development of the mango industry belt in the dry and hot Jinsha River Valley — a concrete example of its service-region model, in which germplasm held in Zhanjiang is converted into varieties and cultivation systems for a production zone hundreds of kilometres away.

Post-harvest research: keeping mango fresh

The institute's post-harvest programme addresses the short shelf life of tropical fruit. In work reported in 2022, researchers in its dry-land new materials research room modified chitosan and gellan gum to construct an amphiphilic chitosan/carboxymethyl gellan gum composite enriched with mustard essential oil, studied its barrier properties, mechanical properties and antibacterial properties, and applied the composite coating to mango preservation. The coating prolonged the peak respiration period of the fruit and extended shelf life by ten days at room temperature compared with uncoated samples, solving the problems of poor mechanical properties and insufficient antibacterial properties of single chitosan polymer films. The results were published in the journal Carbohydrate Polymers, with associate researchers Yang Ziming, Li Puwang and Zhou Chuang among the authors.

Germplasm sharing: saplings for Tibet

The institute's collections also support agricultural development in very different climates. In late April 2017 a truck loaded with 2,000 tree saplings of over ten different varieties was sent from Zhanjiang to the Tibet Autonomous Region, travelling some 3,000 kilometres, under an agreement between SSCRI and the Tibet Academy of Agricultural and Animal Husbandry Sciences to share germplasm resources for breeding and planting. Three institute experts worked with local researchers to plant sweetsop, mango, dragon fruit and other improved saplings in Medog County. According to the institute's macadamia research group leader Zeng Hui, it was the first time Tibet had attempted to plant macadamia nuts, a crop usually grown in warmer environments; the partners aimed to test whether such subtropical species could be established at trial sites in Tibet.

Lychee, macadamia and pineapple programmes

Beyond mango, the institute works to develop new elite cultivars of various subtropical crops and to form corresponding farming technologies giving high quality and high yield, strengthening technical integration, demonstration and extension services. Its technology for transforming low-yielding lychee orchards has been extended to approximately 50,000 hectares, bringing an annual increase of income of more than RMB 500 million, and it has produced new varieties of macadamia as well as of mango. The institute has also established a preliminary framework for the construction of the pineapple industry's technology system. Its facilities include the National Field Genebank for Tropical Fruits — from which, for example, the macadamia varieties Guire 1 and Own Choice used in published nut-composition research were obtained — a pineapple germplasm resource nursery at Zhanjiang used in drought-tolerance gene research, and, per its researchers' published affiliations, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs Key Laboratory of Tropical Fruit Biology and the Hainan provincial Key Laboratory of Postharvest Physiology and Technology of Tropical Horticultural Products. Institute researchers have also published comparative genomic analyses of the four macadamia species, identifying 72,992 gene families across fifteen plant species.

Position in the CATAS system

Within the Chinese Academy of Tropical Agricultural Sciences, SSCRI is the specialist institute for the south subtropics — the climatic belt between China's tropics and its temperate zone — holding national responsibility for the crops of that belt in the way its sister institutes hold responsibility for spice and beverage crops, tropical bioscience or plant protection. Its non-profit status since 2002, its national project portfolio, and its combination of germplasm conservation, variety breeding, cultivation physiology and post-harvest technology on a single Zhanjiang base define its role: keeper of the country's largest mango, pineapple and sisal collections, breeder of the CATAS mango series, and technical supporter of production regions from the Leizhou Peninsula to the Jinsha River valley.