About State Key Laboratory of Food Science and Technology

State Key Laboratory of Food Science and Technology

The State Key Laboratory of Food Science and Technology is China's national laboratory for food science. Headquartered at Jiangnan University, 1800 Lihu Avenue, Wuxi, Jiangsu, and co-hosted with Nanchang University, it is described by its hosts as the only state key laboratory of its kind in China, approved by the Ministry of Science and Technology. It underpins Jiangnan University's food science discipline, which has ranked first worldwide in the ShanghaiRanking Global Ranking of Academic Subjects for food science and technology for successive years. In recent reorganised listings the laboratory also appears as the State Key Laboratory of Food Science and Resources; this profile uses its long-attested classic name.

Setting: Jiangnan University and Wuxi

Jiangnan University sits in Wuxi, on the shore of Lake Tai in Jiangsu Province, and is a national key university under the Ministry of Education, part of both the 211 Project and the Double First-Class initiative. Its roots trace to the San Jiang Normal School founded in 1902; its food lineage runs through the food industry department assembled in Nanjing in 1952 from departments of several universities, moved to Wuxi in 1958 as the Wuxi Institute of Light Industry. Renamed Wuxi University of Light Industry in 1995, it merged with Jiangnan College and Wuxi Education College in 2001 to form the present Jiangnan University. Food science is therefore not an added specialism at Jiangnan — it is the institution's founding industry discipline, and the state key laboratory is its flagship research platform.

The university lists eight national scientific research centres including this laboratory and the national engineering facilities for cereal fermentation and food fermentation technology. Its food science and technology and light industry technology and engineering disciplines have both earned A+ ratings in the Ministry of Education's national discipline assessment, the highest grade awarded.

Status as China's Only Food State Key Laboratory

The laboratory's defining institutional fact is its singularity. Times Higher Education's profile of Jiangnan University describes the laboratory — under its reorganised Food Science and Resources name — as established by the Ministry of Science and Technology and the only one of its kind in China, benefiting from resources provided by Jiangnan University. The clean record for this entry likewise records approval by the Ministry of Science and Technology and co-hosting with Nanchang University in Jiangxi, giving the laboratory a second base in a major agricultural province south of the Yangtze.

As a state key laboratory, it carries the national mission for basic and applied basic research in food science: the chemistry, microbiology, engineering and safety science of foods, from raw materials and fermentation through processing, preservation, nutrition and quality control. China's food industry is among the largest in the world, and the laboratory's role is to supply the fundamental science — on enzymes, microbes, carbohydrates, proteins, lipids and bioactive compounds — on which safer, healthier and higher-value foods depend.

Food Science at World Number One

The discipline the laboratory underpins has an exceptional public record. ShanghaiRanking's Global Ranking of Academic Subjects has placed Jiangnan University's food science and technology first in the world for successive years — Wuxi municipal reporting on the October 2023 release noted a fifth successive first place, in a ranking covering thousands of universities, with Jiangnan's textile science and engineering second in its own subject in the same exercise. University reporting as of that period also noted that the School of Food Science and Technology had collected more than 25,000 probiotic strains, including 200 patented ones — an illustration of the strain-resource base on which fermentation and functional food research at Jiangnan draws.

Rankings measure the host discipline rather than the laboratory alone, but the connection is direct: a state key laboratory concentrates senior researchers, doctoral students, major projects and advanced instrumentation in one platform, and its publications and patents form a large share of the output on which subject rankings are built. The laboratory is best read as the engine room of the world's top-ranked food science discipline.

Fermentation, Enzymes and Biomanufacturing

Published research affiliated with the laboratory shows a strong strand in enzyme science and microbial biotechnology. Work associated with its researchers includes studies of glycoside hydrolases and glucanotransferases that convert starch into functional glucans, cyclodextrin glucosyltransferases engineered by site-saturation mutagenesis to improve specificity for producing stable vitamin C derivatives used in food, medicine and cosmetics, and cutinases expressed in the food-safe bacterium Bacillus subtilis, a workhorse organism for industrial enzyme production. Related work has addressed improving extracellular production of recombinant proteins by co-expression strategies that increase membrane permeability, and genetic tools for efficient gene insertion in Bacillus subtilis itself.

Other affiliated work concerns biosynthesis of human milk oligosaccharides such as 2'-fucosyllactose — the most abundant oligosaccharide in human milk, valued for infant gut health and immunity — seeking routes that avoid costly precursor supplementation. Together these studies show the laboratory's fermentation science extending from traditional food fermentations to precision biomanufacturing of high-value food ingredients.

Food Chemistry, Functional Components and Nutrition

A second visible strand concerns the chemistry and function of food components. Affiliated publications cover chlorogenic acid derivatives synthesised by lipase-catalysed acylation to improve lipophilicity, selenium-enriched mushrooms as both a dietary selenium source and a bioremediation tool, unsaturated fatty acid oleogels designed as healthier structuring fats for baked goods, and corn protein hydrolysates fractionated by molecular size. Work on the calcium-sensing receptor and kokumi peptides addresses taste science — how savoury depth and mouthfulness are perceived — while studies of cassia seed anthraquinones and their enzymatic glycosylation connect traditional food-medicine materials to modern enzyme technology.

Nutrition and health research is also present, including prospective studies of gut microbiota and faecal metabolomes in gestational diabetes conducted with Wuxi hospitals, in which the laboratory — under its Food Science and Resources name — is the corresponding author's affiliation alongside the National Engineering Research Center for Functional Food. The pattern across these examples is consistent: characterise a food component rigorously, understand its mechanism, and develop a processing or biotechnological route to use it better.

Food Safety and Analytical Science

Food safety analysis forms another strand. Affiliated work includes methods for the simultaneous determination of multiple phytohormones in fruits and vegetables by solid-phase extraction combined with high-performance liquid chromatography, and studies of proteins from aquatic foods comparing extraction methods and their effects on structure, physicochemical properties and digestion, including ultrasound-assisted enzymatic treatment of seed proteins. Such work supports both regulatory testing and the design of foods whose nutritional quality survives processing.

The university's recent international initiatives reinforce this direction: its School of Food Science and Technology has launched collaboration to create chiral nanomaterials as adjuvants and to build a comprehensive antibody resource library for food safety, drawing in universities and organisations worldwide. While that initiative sits at school level, it reflects the analytical and immunological capability concentrated around the laboratory's discipline.

Industry Links and National Recognition

Jiangnan's food research is closely tied to industry, as befits a university descended from a light-industry institute. Wuxi reporting records, for example, cooperation between Shanghai-based Bright Dairy and Food and the university on new fermentation technology that contributed to a second prize at the National Technology Invention Awards in 2018. The university reports eight national research centres, dozens of international joint laboratories and extensive research facilities, and describes collaboration as central to its scientific work — a model in which the state key laboratory supplies fundamental results that engineering centres and industry partners convert into processes and products.

The laboratory's researchers publish across the field's leading journals, including Trends in Food Science and Technology, the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, Food and Function, Food and Bioprocess Technology and the Journal of Biotechnology, as the affiliated publication record shows. That breadth — from enzyme mechanism to human nutrition — is characteristic of a mature national laboratory rather than a single-theme institute.

The Nanchang Connection

The laboratory is co-hosted with Nanchang University in Jiangxi Province. Co-hosting spreads the national platform across two strong food research bases: Jiangnan in the Yangtze Delta, with its fermentation and light-industry heritage, and Nanchang, serving a major rice- and agriculture-producing province. Joint state key laboratories of this kind pool research groups under one academic programme and evaluation, allowing complementary strengths — for example in food resources, processing and safety — to be combined at national scale while doctoral training proceeds at both sites.

Standing and Significance

The State Key Laboratory of Food Science and Technology is significant because it concentrates, in one approved national platform, the science behind the world's largest food system at the university whose food discipline ranks first globally in its subject. Its record spans the full chain of food research: microbial strains and enzymes; fermentation and biomanufacturing; starch, protein and lipid chemistry; functional and nutritional components; safety analysis; and industry translation recognised by national awards. Whether cited under its classic name or its reorganised Food Science and Resources name — the form now appearing in journal affiliations from Wuxi — it remains, as its hosts describe it, the only state key laboratory of its kind in China, seated at 1800 Lihu Avenue in Wuxi and co-hosted with Nanchang University.