About State Key Laboratory of Genetic Resources and Evolution

State Key Laboratory of Genetic Resources and Evolution

Overview and identity

The State Key Laboratory of Genetic Resources and Evolution (Chinese: 遗传资源与进化国家重点实验室) is a national State Key Laboratory hosted by the Kunming Institute of Zoology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Kunming, Yunnan. It is the animal-side national laboratory of China's southwestern biodiversity hotspot, studying animal genetic resources and evolution where the fauna is richest. The clean directory record places it in Kunming, in Yunnan province, and its published address in the scientific literature is the Kunming Institute of Zoology, Kunming 650223, China, with an earlier campus address recorded as 32 Jiaochang Road. The laboratory forms part of the Ministry of Science and Technology state key laboratory system, which counted 533 approved laboratories as of 2023. Within Kunming science it complements the phytochemistry laboratory at the city's botany institute: where that laboratory works on plant chemistry, this laboratory works on animals — their genomes, their evolutionary histories, their conservation, and the genetic resources they represent for science, breeding and medicine.

The laboratory's stated aim, in its own institutional description, is to become the centre of research on genetic resources and evolution in China, and a world-leading centre in some aspects of that field. That ambition is grounded in place. Kunming sits at the head of the Indo-Burma biodiversity hotspot, and the host institute serves as China's main centre for research into the diverse animal and ecological resources of southwestern China, the Eastern Himalayas and Southeast Asia. Few state key laboratories anywhere can draw field material, living collections and evolutionary questions so directly from the landscape outside their doors.

Origins in cellular and molecular evolution

The laboratory was established on the basis of the previous Key Laboratory of Cellular and Molecular Evolution of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which was established in 1990. That predecessor laboratory, founded by Professor Li-Ming Shi at the Kunming Institute of Zoology, was among the first laboratories in China to use molecular techniques to study animal diversity and evolution, and its founding made Kunming the research centre for molecular evolution in China. The lineage reaches further back still: in 1986 the host institute established the first wild animal cell bank of China under Shi's leadership, featuring cell lines of endangered species, a collection that later became part of the animal division of the Germplasm Bank of Wild Species and an affiliate of the Committee on Type Culture Collection of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Institute researchers also established lymphoblastoid cell lines for ethnic minorities, building the human genetic resource collections on which later migration and diversity research would draw.

The formal state key laboratory history is precisely dated in the institute's own account. On 6 November 2007 the Ministry of Science and Technology of China approved the establishment of the state key laboratory, and it was accepted on 17 September 2009. The upgrade converted a strong academy-level laboratory into a national platform, with the funding, evaluation and training obligations that status carries in the Chinese research system.

Host institute: the Kunming Institute of Zoology

The host institute gives the laboratory its breadth. The Kunming Institute of Zoology was established in 1959, after an initial application in 1958 to incorporate existing facilities in Kunming, and it marked its 60th anniversary in 2019. Its institutional history includes periods under the Southwest Branch of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and, from 1970 to 1978, under the Yunnan Provincial Government as the Yunnan Institute of Zoology, before it returned to the academy under its present name. An overseas experts review organised by the academy's Bureau of Development Planning during an international evaluation in 2014 described it as a major powerhouse in evolutionary biology research in China that was establishing itself on the world stage.

Alongside the state key laboratory, the institute contains the CAS Key Laboratory of Animal Models and Human Disease Mechanisms, and it houses major national facilities including a national resource centre for non-human primates and a national research facility for phenotypic and genetic analysis of model animals. A joint laboratory with the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the KIZ-CUHK Joint Laboratory of Bioresources and Molecular Research in Common Diseases, established in 2007, is one of the top users of those facilities. By 2021 the institute counted 44 research groups belonging to its two key laboratories. The state key laboratory therefore does not work in isolation: primate facilities, cell and germplasm banks, and disease-model groups sit alongside it inside the same institute.

Leadership, staff and training

The laboratory's own profile records 99 staff members, about half of them holding PhD degrees, including one academician, 18 principal investigators and 12 associate professors, organised in 17 research groups, including one innovation team of the National Natural Science Foundation of China. About 100 graduate students were in training at the time of that profile, making teaching and doctoral supervision a substantial part of the laboratory's work. The director recorded in the institutional profile is academician Yaping Zhang, and the director of the academic committee is academician Zuoyan Zhu. Zhang's research leadership is closely associated with the laboratory's best-known themes: under his leadership the institute became a key DNA sample reservoir of ethnic peoples in China, including Han Chinese from different geographic areas and ethnic minorities.

The laboratory is equipped with instruments its profile values at more than RMB 50 million in total, including an automated DNA sequencer, a microarray scanner, a GenomeLab SNPstream genotyping system and a high-performance computing and cluster system. That equipment list captures the laboratory's method: field and collection-based zoology joined to high-throughput genomics and serious computation, so that a specimen collected in a Yunnan forest can be carried through sequencing, assembly and evolutionary analysis under one roof.

Three major research areas

The laboratory organises its work in three major research areas: evolution and conservation of diverse genetic resources; evolution of genes and genomes; and genetics, development and evolution. Its recognised strengths, as listed by the host institute, include genetic resource collection and conservation, human origin and migration, the origin of primate cognition, the origin of new genes, and the genetic diversity of domestic animals. Each of those strengths maps onto the geography and collections of the southwest: wild fauna for conservation genetics, primates for cognition and disease models, village livestock and their wild relatives for domestication genetics, and the region's human diversity for studies of origin and migration.

The institute's strategic planning reinforces the same priorities at institute level, concentrating on regional animal biodiversity, evolution and preservation, and naming three major breakthroughs to pursue: developing non-human primate models for disease and pharmaceutical research, achieving theoretical discoveries in evolution and genomics, and cultivating genetic resources of domestic animals and their wild counterparts. The state key laboratory is the principal vehicle for the second and third of those goals, and a contributor to the first through its primate genetics.

Genomes, adaptation and domestication

Genome-scale work is the laboratory's signature output. Its researchers have led genome studies of species from rhesus macaques to Yunnan's snub-nosed monkeys, as the directory record notes, and its teams publish across the range of modern evolutionary genomics. A review of genomes and evolutionary genomics of animals by laboratory authors surveyed the flood of complete animal genome sequences and the projects, from reference-genome efforts to the Genome 10K Project, that made them usable for evolutionary questions. A later study of high-altitude canids, co-authored from the laboratory, sequenced 19 new whole genomes from Tibetan and Himalayan wolves and dogs and combined them into a dataset of 166 whole canid genomes, showing how ancient hybridisation with an unknown population facilitated high-altitude adaptation, with the EPAS1 gene central to the story — a direct demonstration of the laboratory's domestication-and-adaptation programme, since dogs and their wild wolf relatives are compared in a single analysis.

Earlier work showed the same breadth in cytogenetics: a 2008 study of neosex chromosomes in the black muntjac, from the CAS-Max Planck Junior Research Group then housed in the laboratory together with the Kunming Cell Bank, used a rare deer genome to recapitulate the incipient evolution of mammalian sex chromosomes. Work on mammary gland stem cells and on large-scale DNA methylation across cancers, also published from the laboratory, shows how its developmental and genomic expertise extends toward human disease mechanisms, complementing the primate-model work elsewhere in the institute.

Conservation genetics and biodiversity measurement

Conservation is the second pillar. Population and conservation genetics studies from the Kunming school, including work on the golden monkey and the Chinese sturgeon, have provided information used in conserving endangered species, and the laboratory's cell bank preserves genetic material from endangered animals as living cell lines. Its primate lineage is long: in 1988 the institute established a Joint Laboratory of Primatology with the Primate Center of Yunnan Province, which progressed in 1996 into a China-US Primate Biology Laboratory with the University of Wisconsin, embedding international collaboration in the laboratory's primate genetics from an early date.

The laboratory is also known internationally for turning DNA sequencing into a measuring instrument for biodiversity itself. Principal investigator Douglas Yu, who directs an ecology, environment and conservation centre at the institute and holds a chair at the University of East Anglia, is described in his biographical notes as a leading developer of methods for rapid assessment of eukaryotic biodiversity using high-throughput DNA sequencing. Papers from his group, affiliated to the state key laboratory, developed metagenomic pipelines that quantify species occurrences and abundance change from DNA barcodes or mitogenomes in bulk samples, and applied metabarcoding to questions such as the biodiversity benefit of native forest. That work connects the laboratory's genomics directly to reserve management and environmental monitoring in the hotspot it inhabits.

Projects, publications and recognition

The laboratory holds or participates in tens of state projects, including key projects from the National Basic Research Program (the 973 Program), the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the CAS Innovation Program. Since 2006 it has published more than 500 papers indexed by the Science Citation Index, some of them in leading general journals including Nature and Science. The honours recorded in its profile include one Biodiversity Leadership Award, one Ho Leung Ho Lee Foundation Prize for Scientific and Technological Progress, eight first prizes for science and technology progress at provincial or ministry level, one Yunnan Outstanding Contribution Award, one Cheung Kong Scholar Achievements Award and one National Award for Outstanding PhD Thesis. Research groups from the laboratory also appear across zoology's specialist literature — for example in studies of cryptic lineage diversity in African agamas conducted with the Sino-Africa Joint Research Center — reflecting the outward reach of a laboratory whose collections and collaborations extend well beyond Yunnan.

Place in the national laboratory system

Within China's state key laboratory system the Kunming laboratory occupies a distinctive niche. Many state key laboratories cluster in Beijing and the coastal universities; this one anchors national capacity in the country's most biodiverse province, where the Eastern Himalayas meet Southeast Asia and where field access to primates, rare ungulates and exceptional insect and fish diversity is measured in hours rather than expeditions. It complements the phytochemistry laboratory at Kunming's botany institute as the animal-side national laboratory of the southwest biodiversity hotspot, and together the two give Kunming a matched pair of national platforms for the region's living resources. For readers of this directory it should be profiled separately from its host institute: the Kunming Institute of Zoology is the broader organisation founded in 1959, while the State Key Laboratory of Genetic Resources and Evolution is its designated national research laboratory, approved in 2007 and accepted in 2009, with its own director, academic committee, research areas and record in genetic resources and evolution.