Feb.23,2022

Professor Shen Shuxing, Director of the State Key Laboratory of Crop Improvement and Regulation in North China, HEBAU, and his team published a research paper entitled”Construction of a High-Density Mutant Population of Chinese Cabbage Facilitates the Genetic Dissection of Agronomic Traits” online in the internationally renowned journal Molecular Plant. It systematically evaluated the created EMS (Ethyl methanesulfonate) mutant library of Chinese Cabbage at the phenotypic and molecular levels, and constructed the genomic and trait data resource sharing platform of the mutant population, which laid a foundation for efficiently analyzing the gene function of Chinese Cabbage and mining new breeding resources.

The study further combined the methods of "Forward Genetics" and "Reverse Genetics", listed the relevant research strategies and cases, such as candidate gene screening and function identification, and showed the great potential and application value of the mutant library in screening, mining and analyzing functional genes. The high-throughput identification and evaluation of the mutant library is realized, which is conducive to mining, developing and obtaining the target genes of important traits with independent intellectual property rights.

In order to promote the wide application of the mutant library, the Chinese Cabbage mutant library database CCEMD was further established（http://www.bioinformaticslab.cn/EMSmutation/home/）. The database provides gene variation and phenotypic variation information of mutant library population, and helps to quickly mine candidate variation genes related to important agronomic traits of Chinese Cabbage and analyze their functions. At the same time, the database will provide mutant information for researchers engaged in Chinese cabbage research domestically and abroad.

Professor Shen Shuxing, Professor Zhao Jianjun and Dr. Ma Wei are the corresponding authors of the paper, and Dr. Sun Xiaoxue, etc., are the co-first-authors of the article. The research was financed by the key and general projects of the National Natural Science Foundation of China, Hebei Provincial Natural Science Foundation Innovation Group and the projects of the State Key Laboratory of Crop Improvement and Regulation in North China, HEBAU.