About Yellow Sea Fisheries Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Fishery Sciences

Yellow Sea Fisheries Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Fishery Sciences

The Yellow Sea Fisheries Research Institute, known by the acronym YSFRI, is the oldest multidisciplinary marine fisheries research institute in China. Based in Qingdao, Shandong, on the coast of the Yellow Sea from which it takes its name, it belongs to the Chinese Academy of Fishery Sciences and is affiliated to the Ministry of Agriculture. Its official website is at ysfri.ac.cn, with an English introduction presenting the institute, its research divisions and its scientific achievements to an international audience. As a directory entry, YSFRI represents a distinctive kind of Chinese research agency: a publicly funded institute whose laboratory work, survey voyages and breeding programmes directly support a national fishing and aquaculture industry, and whose publications and reference laboratories serve scientists well beyond China.

Origins in Shanghai in 1947 and the Move to Qingdao

YSFRI grew out of the Central Fisheries Laboratory of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, founded in Shanghai in January 1947. In September 1949, on the eve of the founding of the People's Republic of China, the laboratory moved to Qingdao, the Shandong port city that has remained its home ever since. That origin makes it older than the academy that now parents it: the Chinese Academy of Fishery Sciences itself was founded in 1978, three decades after YSFRI's predecessor began work. The institute's own brief introduction stresses this continuity, describing nearly seventy years of dedication to academic excellence by the time of that summary. Few Chinese marine institutes can trace an unbroken institutional line through the late Republican period, the early People's Republic and the reform era, and that longevity shapes YSFRI's self-understanding as the founding institute of modern Chinese marine fisheries science.

Place in the Chinese Academy of Fishery Sciences

Within the Chinese Academy of Fishery Sciences, YSFRI is one of three sea-area institutes, alongside the East China Sea Fisheries Research Institute in Shanghai and the South China Sea Fisheries Research Institute in Guangzhou. The academy, headquartered in Beijing under the Ministry of Agriculture, operates nine fisheries research institutes and four fisheries resources enhancement stations across fourteen locations. Each sea-area institute takes scientific responsibility for its own sea: for YSFRI, the Yellow Sea and the northern waters associated with it, including the Bohai rim and the cold-water fisheries of northern China. That division of labour explains the institute's particular strengths in cold-water species such as the Chinese fleshy shrimp, in flatfish of northern waters, and in the ecology of the Yellow Sea ecosystem, one of the world's most intensively used large marine ecosystems.

Structure, Staff and Research Vessels

The institute's own introduction records ten research divisions and three experimental bases. It reports 419 faculty and staff members, including three academicians of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and 157 senior scientists, among them nineteen doctoral supervisors and eighty-two master's supervisors. Those figures, published by the institute itself, place YSFRI among the larger CAFS institutes and reflect its combined role as research institute, graduate training base and experimental production platform. YSFRI owns two research vessels, named in its introduction as Beidou and Huanghaixing, equipped with modern facilities to carry out fisheries research at sea. Survey work from such vessels underpins its resource assessments: without repeated, standardised cruises, neither stock estimates nor ecosystem monitoring would be possible, and the vessels are therefore as central to the institute as its laboratories ashore.

A Record of Projects and Awards

YSFRI states that it has completed more than 1,300 research projects at state, provincial and ministerial level, made over 300 key scientific discoveries, and won awards more than 200 times. Its own tally lists forty-three national awards and over 160 ministerial and provincial awards, including two first-class and five second-class National Awards for Progress in Science and Technology, three second-class National Invention Awards and one third-class National Natural Science Award. Such counts should be read as the institute's published record rather than as a ranking, but they do convey the applied character of its work: national technology-progress awards in China are given for research that has demonstrably changed production practice, not only for laboratory discovery. In fisheries, that means new varieties, new farming systems and new resource-management methods adopted by fleets and farms.

Shrimp Breeding and the Huanghai Varieties

No YSFRI programme is better documented internationally than its selective breeding of the Chinese fleshy shrimp, Fenneropenaeus chinensis. The species, a cold-water shrimp of the Yellow Sea and Bohai, was devastated by the nationwide outbreak of white spot syndrome in the early 1990s. From 1997, YSFRI scientists worked to select and breed a variety with improved grow-out performance. After seven generations of selection they produced Huanghai No. 1 in the early 2000s, described as the first new variety of F. chinensis; further selection produced Huanghai No. 2, obtained in 2008 after eleven generations with faster growth, and Huanghai No. 3, obtained in 2013. Institute presentations describe the full breeding pipeline behind those names: collection of germplasm from Yellow Sea populations near Haiyang and Haizhou Bay and from the west coast of Korea, family construction at its Qingdao genetic breeding centre, testing for white spot syndrome virus resistance, growth and survival, estimation of genetic parameters, and large-scale family and individual selection. A dedicated Genetic and Breeding Center for Mariculture, funded by the Ministry of Agriculture and fully operational by the mid-2000s, provided greenhouse space with hundreds of fibreglass and cement tanks for larval culture and a separate greenhouse producing unicellular algae as larval feed.

Flatfish Genetics and Germplasm Creation

A second flagship line is marine flatfish genetics. YSFRI project accounts describe completion of the first whole-genome sequencing for a flatfish species, the half-smooth tongue sole, analysis of the genome structures of tongue sole and Japanese flounder, and construction of high-density genetic linkage maps for both. Researchers cloned dozens of immune, disease-resistance and growth-related genes, identified the sex-determining gene dmrt1 as Z-chromosome-linked and key to testis development in tongue sole, and explained the problem of low female ratios that had limited tongue sole farming. From that science came named products: a high-yield, disease-resistant Japanese flounder germplasm marketed as Ping You No. 1, with reported growth and survival gains, and an all-female, high-yield flounder, Bei Ping No. 1. The same project reported 145 papers, eighteen patents and a monograph. Whether or not a reader follows the genetics, the pattern is characteristic of YSFRI: fundamental genome work is carried through, deliberately, into varieties that farms can stock.

Germplasm Cryopreservation and the National Resource Bank

Preserving genetic material is the necessary complement to breeding it. YSFRI established a fish germplasm cryopreservation technology system covering sperm, embryos and embryonic stem cells. Its project account reports a high-throughput fish sperm cryopreservation technology with developed diluents for different species, sperm cryopreservation for thirty fish species including turbot, and a sperm cryobank applied in production. It also reports a marine fish embryo vitrification method through which freeze-revived embryos and fry of marine fish were obtained, and the establishment of embryonic stem cells of sea perch and red sea bream. The institutional culmination of this work is the National Marine Fishery Biological Germplasm Resource Bank, built by YSFRI in Qingdao. The bank's construction project passed national acceptance in November 2023; reports of the acceptance describe it as the largest marine fishery germplasm resource bank in China by investment scale and preserved species, storing nearly 140,000 physical germplasm resources since its launch phase and completing genome sequencing of important marine fishery species. The bank was approved in 2015, with feasibility, preliminary design and budget approvals following in 2016 and 2017.

Disease Reference Laboratories and Fish Health

YSFRI hosts reference laboratories recognised by the World Organisation for Animal Health, historically known by its French acronym OIE, for white spot disease and for infectious hypodermal and hematopoietic necrosis — two of the most damaging viral diseases of farmed shrimp. Reference-laboratory status is not honorary: such laboratories hold reference materials, validate diagnostic methods, and support other laboratories nationally and internationally. For an institute whose breeding programmes were born from the white spot catastrophe of the 1990s, hosting the reference laboratories closes a circle. Disease science at YSFRI spans diagnosis, epidemiology and the breeding of resistant stock, so that a shrimp farmer's problem in a coastal pond connects, through the institute, to international standards for aquatic animal health.

Publications and Public Voice

YSFRI sponsors Progress in Fishery Sciences, a bimonthly journal committed, in the institute's words, to orienting researchers towards sustainable marine fisheries topics. Its scientists also publish extensively in international journals of aquaculture, genetics and marine science, and present institute programmes at bodies such as the North Pacific Marine Science Organization, where YSFRI shrimp-breeding work has been presented in detail. The official website, ysfri.ac.cn, carries an English section with the institute's brief introduction, research news and project accounts of the kind summarised in this profile, including its cryopreservation and flatfish genetics programmes. For a directory user, that site is the authoritative first stop: it is where the institute states its own structure, staff, vessels and awards, and where its newest breeding and resource-bank announcements appear.

Why the Institute Matters

China is the world's largest producer of farmed aquatic products, and the Yellow Sea is one of its most productive and most pressured seas. YSFRI matters because it supplies three things that industry cannot supply for itself: long-term survey knowledge of wild stocks, genetically improved varieties of farmed species, and preserved germplasm that keeps future breeding possible. Its history — from a 1947 Shanghai laboratory to a Qingdao institute operating research vessels, reference laboratories and a national germplasm bank — is in miniature the history of Chinese marine fisheries science. Readers who want the primary source should begin with the institute's own site and its journal, and treat commercial or news summaries of its varieties and awards as pointers back to that record.