About State Key Laboratory of Phytochemistry and Plant Resources in West China

State Key Laboratory of Phytochemistry and Plant Resources in West China

The State Key Laboratory of Phytochemistry and Plant Resources in West China (Chinese: 植物化学与西部植物资源持续利用国家重点实验室) is a national State Key Laboratory hosted by the Kunming Institute of Botany of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Kunming, Yunnan, beside the institute's botanical garden in one of the world's richest temperate floras. It studies the chemistry of plants and the sustainable use of western China's plant resources: the isolation and synthesis of natural products, the active compounds of the traditional medicinal plants of Yunnan and the southwest, and the chemistry underpinning new drugs, agrochemicals and fragrances. The laboratory's natural product chemists have characterised hundreds of compounds from the regional flora. As part of the Ministry of Science and Technology state key laboratory system, which counted 533 approved laboratories as of 2023, it is the system's principal laboratory for phytochemistry, paired in Kunming with the genetic resources and germplasm work of the city's other academy institutes.

Establishment and host institute

The Kunming Institute of Botany records that the former State Key Laboratory of Phytochemistry and Plant Resources in West China was established in 2001, as approved by the Ministry of Science and Technology, building on decades of phytochemistry at the institute. The host institute itself was founded in 1938 as the Yunnan Provincial Institute of Agricultural and Forestry Botany, created through collaboration between the Jingsheng Biology Institute and the Yunnan education authorities; it passed to the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1950 and in 1959 officially became the Kunming Institute of Botany. The institute today covers some 68 hectares, manages botanical gardens in Kunming and Lijiang, and organises its research around the state key laboratory, a key laboratory for plant diversity and biogeography of East Asia, a key laboratory of economic plants and biotechnology, and the Germplasm Bank of Wild Species. Its stated aims are breakthrough advances in botany and phytochemistry and in the exploration, utilisation and conservation of plant resources, particularly in southwestern China, Southeast Asia and the Himalayas.

Founders: Zhou Jun and the phytochemistry school

The laboratory's founding figure is the phytochemist Zhou Jun, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences since 1999, described in a history published on the institute's eightieth anniversary as one of the pioneers of the Kunming Institute of Botany and a major founder of the state key laboratory. Zhou arrived in Kunming in 1958, on graduating from the East China College of Chemical Technology, joining a newly established phytochemical resource group of only eight members; that group grew through successive forms — a wild plant resource research laboratory and, from 1963, a phytochemistry research laboratory — into the school from which the state key laboratory was built. Zhou's team explored the chemical composition of traditional Chinese medicinal plants across genera including Dioscorea, Aconitum, Panax, Paris, Cynanchum, Gastrodia and Dendrobium, identifying steroids, triterpenoids, alkaloids, cyclic peptides and phenols and revealing the principal active constituents of medicines such as Panax notoginseng, Paris yunnanensis and Gastrodia elata. As director of the institute he also promoted the international exchanges and team building on which the laboratory's later growth rested.

The Isodon diterpenoid programme

A second signature programme is the study of diterpenoids from Isodon (formerly Rabdosia) plants, led by Professor Sun Handong, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences since 2003 who served as vice director of the laboratory's academic committee. The institute records that Sun's team took the lead in China in research on the ent-kaurane diterpenoids of the Isodon family as early as 1976, and over more than two decades became a world research centre for these compounds, which attract attention for their antibacterial and antineoplastic properties. The team identified and isolated more than 300 new diterpenoids from 48 species of the family, accounting for over sixty percent of the world total both in plants studied and in new diterpenoids found from them, and was credited with two of the five basic skeleton frameworks of ent-kaurane diterpenoids discovered worldwide and half of the twenty-two known diterpenoid structure types. Sun's group phytochemically investigated more than 200 plants across families including Labiatae, Taxaceae, Schisandraceae, Umbelliferae and Lauraceae, isolating and characterising about 2,200 compounds including some 700 new ones. The work was honoured with a first prize of the 2002 Yunnan provincial natural science award.

Natural products and drug discovery

The laboratory's mission, restated by its host institute, is the discovery of bioactive natural products and natural medicines from the abundant plant resources of southwest China, encompassing their structural diversity, biological activity and function, biosynthesis, chemical synthesis, medicinal properties and drug development. In practice this means a pipeline that begins with field collection and identification in one of the world's great centres of plant diversity, proceeds through extraction, isolation and structural determination of compounds — the hundreds of characterised compounds credited to its chemists — and continues to the testing of biological activity, the synthesis of promising structures and the assessment of their potential as drugs, agrochemicals or fragrances. The genera its founders worked on read as a pharmacopoeia of the southwest: ginseng relatives, monkshood, Paris, Gastrodia orchids and Dendrobium orchids, plants used for centuries in regional medicine whose active chemistry the laboratory has done more than any other institution to explain.

Plant resources of west China

The second half of the laboratory's name commits it to the plant resources of west China and their sustainable use. Yunnan and the wider southwest, where the flora of the Himalaya-Hengduan region meets subtropical Asia, hold an exceptional share of China's plant species, and the laboratory's institute is their principal scientific custodian, with its germplasm bank conserving wild species and its gardens in Kunming and Lijiang displaying and studying living collections. The laboratory's five development fields at institute level — plant taxonomy and biogeography, phytochemistry and natural product development, preservation and utilisation of wild germplasm resources, ethnobotany and local development, and the research, development and industrialisation of plant resources — frame chemistry as one part of a larger effort to know, conserve and benefit from the regional flora without exhausting it. Sustainable utilisation in the laboratory's Chinese name is a deliberate term: harvesting, cultivation and chemical use of wild plants must be reconciled with conservation if the resource base is to survive.

The Hong Kong partner laboratory

The laboratory's reach extends beyond Kunming through a formal partnership with The Chinese University of Hong Kong. The university's Institute of Chinese Medicine records that a long-term partnership with the Kunming Institute of Botany began in 2007, when the two institutes agreed to establish a joint laboratory on the phytochemistry of medicinal plants and plant resources and applied jointly for state key laboratory status; in mid-2009 the State Key Laboratory of Phytochemistry and Plant Resources in West China (CUHK) was approved by the Ministry of Science and Technology as the partner laboratory in Hong Kong. The partner laboratory aimed to apply scientific proof of efficacy and safety to traditional Chinese medicines and to enhance their international acceptance, focusing on the phytochemistry and sustainability of plant resources in western China in areas including cancer treatment, cardiovascular health, health supplements, DNA authentication and barcoding of medicinal materials, and viral infection. From September 2018 the Hong Kong partner continued under the name State Key Laboratory of Research on Bioactivities and Clinical Applications of Medicinal Plants, while the Kunming laboratory remained the parent institution of the partnership.

Succession: toward phytochemistry and natural medicines

The laboratory's story continues into the reorganisation of China's state key laboratory system. Kunming Institute of Botany recruitment notices describe a State Key Laboratory of Phytochemistry and Natural Medicines under construction, for which the institute has sought a director, deputy directors and leading scientists, and state explicitly that the former State Key Laboratory of Phytochemistry and Plant Resources in West China, established in 2001, is its predecessor. The new laboratory's stated focus, based on the abundant plant resources of the southwest, is the discovery of bioactive natural products and natural medicines, including their structural diversity, biological activity and function, biosynthesis, chemical synthesis, medicinal properties and drug development — a direct continuation of the programme built by Zhou Jun, Sun Handong and their colleagues. The laboratory profiled here is therefore recorded in its established form, as the national phytochemistry laboratory that served from 2001 and from which the successor laboratory descends.

Place in Kunming science

Kunming hosts a cluster of Chinese Academy of Sciences institutes devoted to the biology of the southwest, and this laboratory is its chemistry arm: where the botanists document the flora and the germplasm bank conserves it, the phytochemists determine what its plants contain and what those contents can do. Its pairing in this directory with the genetic resources work of Kunming's zoology institute reflects the city's division of labour between the plant and animal kingdoms of a biodiversity hotspot. Nationally, as the state key laboratory system's principal laboratory for phytochemistry, it anchors a field in which China holds natural advantages — an immense medicinal flora, a documented tradition of herbal medicine and the chemical expertise to connect the two — and its compounds, structures and methods are cited wherever natural product chemistry is practised.

Profile summary

The State Key Laboratory of Phytochemistry and Plant Resources in West China was established in 2001 at the Kunming Institute of Botany of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Kunming, Yunnan, an institute founded in 1938. Built by the phytochemistry school of Academician Zhou Jun and known internationally for work including Academician Sun Handong's Isodon diterpenoid programme, it conducted national-level research on the chemistry of plants and the sustainable use of western China's plant resources, from the active compounds of traditional medicinal plants to new drugs, agrochemicals and fragrances, with a partner laboratory at The Chinese University of Hong Kong approved in 2009. It is profiled in this directory as the state key laboratory system's principal laboratory for phytochemistry.