About State Key Laboratory of Environmental Chemistry and Ecotoxicology

State Key Laboratory of Environmental Chemistry and Ecotoxicology

Overview and identity

The State Key Laboratory of Environmental Chemistry and Ecotoxicology (Chinese: 环境化学与生态毒理学国家重点实验室), known in the Nature Index by the acronym SKLECE, is a national State Key Laboratory hosted by the Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. Its published address is the Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Beijing 100085, China, at the centre's campus in Haidian District. It studies what chemicals do in the environment and to living organisms: the fate and transport of persistent organic pollutants and emerging contaminants, analytical methods for trace toxics, and the molecular mechanisms of toxicity. As part of the Ministry of Science and Technology state key laboratory system, which counted 533 approved laboratories as of 2023, it is housed at the same Beijing centre as the urban and regional ecology laboratory but is devoted to environmental chemistry and toxicology rather than ecosystem science.

The laboratory's standing is visible in research-output measures. In the Nature Index window from 1 July 2025 to 30 June 2026 the laboratory recorded 143 articles with a Share of 38.51, spread across Earth and environmental sciences, biological sciences, chemistry and applied sciences, and an earlier window recorded a comparable volume with multiple papers in Environmental Science and Technology, Analytical Chemistry and ACS Nano and contributions in Nature and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Output at that level, sustained across windows, places the laboratory among China's most productive environmental research units.

Authorisation and host centre history

The host centre's own chronology gives the laboratory a two-step founding. In 2002 the Key Laboratory of Environmental Chemistry and Ecotoxicology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences was authorised; on 22 March 2005 the State Key Laboratory of Environmental Chemistry and Ecotoxicology was authorised, elevating it to national status. The centre behind it descends from the Institute of Environmental Chemistry, founded on 18 March 1975 beside Yanqi Lake in Huairou County, which amalgamated with the Research Center of Ecology on 3 August 1986 to form the Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, moved to its present Haidian location in December 1991, and had founded an earlier State Key Laboratory of Environmental Aquatic Chemistry in 1989. Environmental chemistry is thus the founding discipline of the whole centre, and this laboratory is its modern national expression.

The laboratory's director established its programme personally. Guibin Jiang received his PhD in environmental analytical chemistry from the Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences in 1991, spent four years as a visiting scholar at the National Research Council of Canada and a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Antwerp in Belgium, and returned to the centre in 1996 as a professor of environmental chemistry and ecotoxicology. He established the State Key Laboratory of Environmental Chemistry and Ecotoxicology and has been its director since then, and he has also served as director of the host centre since 2004. In December 2009 he was selected as a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. His biography, as summarised by the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology's Institute for Advanced Study, credits his methodical research with significant achievements in the analytical development and environmental characterisation of persistent organic pollutants and in the speciation of organometallic compounds, contributing to the improvement and internationalisation of those fields in China.

People and scientific leadership

Around the director, the laboratory's senior figures map its subfields. Minghui Zheng, professor and deputy director of the laboratory, is a member of the Global Coordination Group under the Stockholm Convention, and his research interests cover the dioxin emission inventory of China and the formation and degradation of dioxins and other persistent organic pollutants. Bin Zhao, also a professor in the laboratory, works on the health effects of dioxins and other persistent organic pollutants, their molecular mechanisms of action, and the development and application of bioassays for detecting environmental pollutants. Jiang himself works across environmental analysis, elemental speciation, emerging contaminants and ecotoxicology, has served as an associate editor of Environmental Science and Technology and co-editor-in-chief of NanoImpact, and has held presidencies and vice-presidencies including president of the China Association for Instrumental Analysis and vice-president of the Chinese Chemical Society and the Chinese Society of Toxicology.

Honours recorded for the laboratory's leadership include National Natural Science Awards in 2003 and 2011 and the Chang Jiang Scholars Achievement Award in 2007, given for outstanding research on the analytical methodology, distribution, accumulation and toxicity of persistent organic pollutants. Jiang is also a fellow of the Third World Academy of Sciences and of the Royal Society of Chemistry. The combination of academy membership, treaty-body service and journal editorships reflects a laboratory that does not only produce papers: it helps set the methods and standards by which its field works.

Persistent organic pollutants and the Stockholm Convention

Persistent organic pollutants — POPs — are the laboratory's defining subject. The centre's environmental chemists, including internationally known dioxin and persistent-pollutant researchers, made the laboratory a reference point for China's work under the Stockholm Convention and for national pollutant monitoring methods, as the directory record puts it. The Convention is the global treaty that restricts chemicals which persist in the environment, bioaccumulate through food webs and pose risks to humans and ecosystems; organochlorine pesticides, polychlorinated biphenyls, polybrominated diphenyl ethers and hexabromocyclododecanes are among the categories it lists. Laboratory studies have measured exactly those families in demanding settings, for example in the air of the Shergyla Mountain on the southeastern Tibetan Plateau, where 28 organochlorine pesticides, 25 polychlorinated biphenyls, 13 polybrominated diphenyl ethers and three hexabromocyclododecane isomers were tracked along altitude gradients in a pristine mountain environment.

The laboratory's POPs work connects measurement to regulation. Zheng's dioxin emission inventory work addresses the basic regulatory question of how much dioxin China emits and from where, while its formation and degradation research addresses how those emissions can be cut at source. This is science with a treaty timetable behind it: parties to the Stockholm Convention must inventory and reduce listed pollutants, and the laboratory supplies part of the analytical and inventory capacity on which China's reporting rests.

Dioxins: building a national capability

A brief history of dioxin emissions and human exposure in China, authored by Zhao, Zheng and Jiang from the laboratory, documents the capability gap the laboratory helped close. In the late 1980s Chinese dioxin research focused mainly on by-product residues from the production of pentachlorophenol and its sodium salt, and it was not until 1996 that China established the nation's first dioxin analysis laboratory, in Wuhan. Supported by national basic research projects on dioxin and other persistent organic pollutants, capacity building accelerated greatly from 2002, until China had nearly 30 fully equipped dioxin analysis laboratories, and Chinese scientists had conducted extensive studies of background levels, distribution, transfer and transformation patterns of dioxin in the environment. In October 2010 nine Chinese ministries and commissions jointly issued guidance on strengthening dioxin pollution prevention, requiring key dioxin-emitting industries to carry out comprehensive reduction actions.

Within that national build-out, the Beijing laboratory is the research leader rather than a routine monitoring shop: it develops the analytical methods, studies formation and destruction mechanisms, and examines human exposure and health effects, including work on thyroid homeostasis at an electronic-waste recycling site cited in its own history of the field. Its ecotoxicology of POPs in birds, reviewed by laboratory authors in 2021, synthesised global evidence that POPs occur at high levels in birds and interfere with endocrine, immune and neural systems, reproduction, development and growth, and explained species-specific sensitivity to dioxin-like compounds through differences in the ligand-binding domain of the aryl hydrocarbon receptor.

Analytical chemistry, speciation and emerging contaminants

If POPs are the laboratory's best-known target, analytical chemistry is its engine. Jiang's programme in elemental speciation — determining not merely how much of an element is present but in which chemical forms — and in analytical methodology for trace toxics underlies the laboratory's ability to find pollutants at the extremely low concentrations at which dioxins and similar compounds act. Emerging contaminants extend the same approach to newer substances as they are recognised, and the laboratory's output spans environmental science and technology, analytical chemistry and nanoscience journals accordingly, reflecting work from method development through field measurement to effects assessment. The laboratory also contributes to the centre's wider water research: reviews of environmental aquatic chemistry at the centre credit its community with breakthroughs in the identification and transformation of emerging contaminants, advanced water treatment technologies and risk assessment of waterborne pollutants, alongside newer directions in artificial-intelligence-assisted water systems and nature-based purification.

Ecotoxicology completes the chain from chemistry to consequence. The laboratory studies molecular mechanisms of toxicity — how pollutants bind receptors, disturb endocrine signalling and damage development — and develops bioassays that detect pollutant activity in samples without identifying every compound present. That combination, chemistry plus mechanism, is what distinguishes an ecotoxicology laboratory from a monitoring service, and it explains why its researchers are cited both by analytical chemists and by the risk assessors who use their results.

Research output and international role

The laboratory's publication footprint is broad and current. Its Nature Index record draws on journals across environmental, chemical and biological sciences, and its authors appear in collaborative studies with partners abroad — the Tibetan Plateau POPs study, for instance, joined the Beijing laboratory to the Helmholtz Zentrum München and the Technical University of Munich. Its senior staff serve the international system directly: a deputy director sits on the Stockholm Convention's Global Coordination Group, which coordinates the treaty's global monitoring of POPs, and its director's fellowship of the Royal Society of Chemistry and the Third World Academy of Sciences marks international peer recognition. Domestically, the laboratory's methods feed national pollutant monitoring, and its scientists train the analytical chemists who staff China's wider network of dioxin and POPs laboratories.

Place in the national system and distinction from its sister laboratory

For directory readers, the essential distinctions are two. The laboratory is profiled separately from its host centre: the Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences is the academy institute formed in 1986, while the State Key Laboratory of Environmental Chemistry and Ecotoxicology is its national laboratory for pollutant chemistry and toxicology, authorised at academy level in 2002 and as a state key laboratory on 22 March 2005. And it must not be confused with its sister at the same centre, the State Key Laboratory of Urban and Regional Ecology, authorised in 2006: that laboratory studies ecosystems, landscapes and cities, while this one studies the chemicals that move through them and the harm those chemicals do. Between method and mechanism, inventory and treaty, the Beijing laboratory remains China's reference laboratory for environmental chemistry and ecotoxicology.