State Key Laboratory of Agrobiotechnology: From Samuel Sun's Lysine Rice to Lam Hon-ming's Soybean Genes

In a sentence: The CUHK State Key Laboratory of Agrobiotechnology was approved by the Ministry of Science and Technology in 2008 with China Agricultural University as its partner; its two directors, Samuel Sun Sai-man and Lam Hon-ming, have focused on rice and soybean respectively, and in 2025 it was restructured and renamed a "National Key Laboratory".

This article is a factual reference archive for Section 04 (Research). No credibility badges are assigned; every claim is tied to an official or academic source. The scholars discussed are public figures, named from public records in accordance with the facts. It approaches this laboratory from a different angle—looking not at the granular details of individual research outputs, but at the people at the helm and the institutional framework that supports them: who built it, who took the baton, and how it connects with mainland China and the wider world. For the complete scientific journey of salt-tolerant soybeans, from gene to the fields of Gansu, see Salt-tolerant Soybeans: From Gene to the Saline-Alkali Soils of Gansu; for the wider landscape of CUHK's state key laboratories, see CUHK's Research Establishment.

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# Why is an agricultural laboratory situated in a Hong Kong university?

Hong Kong has no vast farmland, yet it houses a national-level agricultural laboratory. That fact alone warrants a preliminary "why?" The answer lies in a specific institutional structure—the Partner Laboratory.

The door for Hong Kong universities to host national-level laboratories was gradually opened after the handover. According to a report by BioTrade^※, in October 2005, the University of Hong Kong's State Key Laboratories for "Emerging Infectious Diseases" and "Brain and Cognitive Sciences" were inaugurated, the first state key laboratories at that time located outside the mainland. Places were subsequently rolled out across institutions, and CUHK received approvals in fields including translational oncology (2006) and agrobiotechnology (2008). These laboratories mostly took the form of a "partner laboratory," twinned with a supporting unit on the mainland—the Hong Kong side contributing international networks, talent, and management; the mainland side providing scale, resources, and application scenarios. The two halves joined to form a complete research unit.

The State Key Laboratory of Agrobiotechnology (SKLA) is precisely such a unit. According to CUHK's research page^※, it was approved in 2008 by the Ministry of Science and Technology of the People's Republic of China, with China Agricultural University as its partner institution. Its rationale for existence is not "Hong Kong needs to farm," but rather "Hong Kong's molecular biology capability is plugged into the nation's food security agenda." According to CUHK Research's partner laboratory page^※, the laboratory's mission is expressed as using molecular biotechnology to "improve the yield and nutritional value of rice and other crops, and ensure food security," by combining "traditional wisdom of farmers and breeders" with modern biotechnology.

Incidentally, agrobiotechnology was not CUHK's only national-level presence in the "plant" direction. According to the same wave of expansion tracked in BioTrade's report^※, CUHK was later approved in November 2009 to establish a State Key Laboratory of Traditional Chinese Medicine and Plant Resources, related to the "Conservation and Utilisation of Plant Resources in South China and Southwest China" (medicinal plant direction), holding the two fronts of "crops" and "medicinal plants" alongside the Agrobiotechnology laboratory. Juxtaposing the two laboratories outlines an overall strategy: CUHK slicing its disciplinary strength in "plant science" into food and medicinal streams, each grafted onto distinct national needs. This article focuses on the agrobiotechnology branch; for the affiliation of the plant resources direction, CUHK's list of state key laboratories^※ is the definitive source.

This institutional background determines the narrative sequence that follows: first, the person who built it.

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# Who built this laboratory? Founding director Samuel Sun

The founding director of the State Key Laboratory of Agrobiotechnology was Professor Samuel Sun Sai-Man (辛世文). This name has a special place in Hong Kong's scientific history—he was one of the earliest agrobiotechnology scholars from Hong Kong academia to be elected an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and was known in mainland academic circles as the "father of plant gene cloning."

According to Wikipedia^※, Sun was born on 15 September 1942 in Chikan, Guangzhouwan (present-day Chikan District, Zhanjiang, Guangdong). He graduated from the Department of Biology at New Asia College, The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1966, then went to the United States for further study, earning his PhD in plant biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin in 1974. He served as Principal Scientist and Director of Molecular Biology at the ARCO Plant Cell Research Institute in the US, and as a full professor in the Department of Plant Molecular Physiology at the University of Hawaii, before returning to CUHK in the 1990s as Chair Professor and Chairman of the Department of Biology. According to the Chinese Academy of Engineering Academician Hall^※, he was elected an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering in 2003. After returning to CUHK, he also served as the founding College Master of S.H. Ho College (2006 to 2018), entwining the latter part of his research career with collegiate education.

Sun's research signature is protein in seeds. According to the Chinese Academy of Engineering Academician Hall^※ and Wikipedia^※, his early research in the US was noted for cloning plant genes and revealing introns in plant genes, which earned him the mainland academic moniker "father of plant gene cloning." He later directed this foundational capability toward a concrete livelihood issue: populations that rely on rice as a staple commonly lack the essential amino acid lysine—because lysine content in rice seeds is naturally low. His academician biography notes that through gene transfer technology, he significantly increased the essential amino acid content in seed proteins by roughly 30%, and on this basis developed high-lysine rice. From "enabling seeds to store a bit more good protein" to "sparing children in poor countries a little malnutrition"—this research thread later became one of the earliest signature projects of the State Key Laboratory of Agrobiotechnology.

It is worth noting the name itself: the Chinese characters for founding director Samuel Sun Sai-Man are occasionally miswritten in folk sources and some secondhand materials as phonetically similar variants. The name 「辛世文」 as recorded by the Chinese Academy of Engineering Academician Hall^※ is definitive. He was the foundational figure who brought this laboratory all the way from an Area of Excellence centre to a State Key Laboratory, and the key individual who brought Hong Kong's reputation in molecular biology into the nation's agricultural science and technology system.

# Why did Samuel Sun's high-lysine rice become linked with the Gates Foundation?

Because the development of nutritionally fortified crops was, at the time, held hostage by the patents of a few multinational seed companies, and a charitable foundation was intent on reopening this path for developing countries. According to a 2008 CUHK official press release^※, the laboratory launched an international collaborative project funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, amounting to HK$88 million, uniting six laboratories from four countries to tackle the goal of improving rice's nutritional value. The project landed on Sun's long-cultivated seed protein platform—connecting the fundamental research capability of "enabling seeds to store more good protein" to the real-world need of "sparing children in poor countries from malnutrition."

Sun's articulation of the laboratory's founding purpose was officially recorded. According to another CUHK press release from 2008^※, he stressed that the laboratory should "combine traditional breeding wisdom and modern biotechnology to produce new rice varieties with higher yield and better nutritional value," because rice is the staple food for about half the world's population. This statement set the tone for the laboratory: it was not here to produce startling, abstruse frontier science, but to bring biotechnology to bear on "a bowl of rice."

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# The laboratory's roots lie in a UGC-funded "Area of Excellence"

The State Key Laboratory of Agrobiotechnology did not appear out of thin air; its initial talent and funding base came from an earlier grant from the University Grants Committee (UGC).

According to the 2008 CUHK official press release^※, Sun had been leading the CUHK UGC Area of Excellence Centre for Plant and Agricultural Biotechnology since 2000. The centre twice received funding under the UGC's Areas of Excellence scheme, securing a total of over HK$63 million over ten years. The approval of the State Key Laboratory was effectively an upgrade for this already operational platform, affixing a "national-level" signboard. The laboratory was approved on 2 April 2008 and officially inaugurated on 13 December of the same year.

This path—"first an Area of Excellence centre, then a State Key Laboratory"—also explains why it had presentable projects right from its opening. The Gates Foundation's lysine rice and the later soybean genomics work were not products of a new lab starting from scratch, but a continuation of years of accumulation by an existing team.

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# Who took over? From Samuel Sun to Lam Hon-ming

The character of a laboratory is judged half by how it starts and half by how it passes the baton. The second-generation head of the State Key Laboratory of Agrobiotechnology is Professor Lam Hon-ming (林汉明)—the current director, and the person who brought this laboratory from the "rice era" into the "soybean era."

According to CUHK's research page^※, the laboratory is now directed by Lam Hon-ming. He has been conducting in-depth research on soybean stress tolerance since his return to CUHK in 1997, with a crucial strategic shift in his thinking: returning to wild soybeans. Decades of artificial selection have caused cultivated soybeans to lose some stress-resistance genes, whereas wild soybeans retain a richer reservoir of such genetic resources. Following this line of inquiry, his team completed 31 soybean genome resequencing projects, cloned the salt-tolerance gene GmCHX1, completed the world's first reference-grade wild soybean genome, extended stress-tolerant varieties to the saline-alkali soils of Gansu, and even sent rhizobia to the China Space Station. This entire scientific journey, from gene to field and into space, is detailed in a separate article within this archive; see Salt-tolerant Soybeans: From Gene to the Saline-Alkali Soils of Gansu and will not be elaborated upon here.

From Samuel Sun to Lam Hon-ming, the laboratory's staple-food focus underwent a quiet shift: from the "nutritional enhancement" of rice to the "stress-tolerance breeding" of soybeans. These two lines are not mutually exclusive—rice addresses "eating nutritiously," while soybeans address "being able to grow even on poor land," both anchoring the laboratory's overarching remit of "food security." The passing of the baton between the two directors also gradually layered the laboratory's early internationalist tinge—"Hong Kong does the fundamentals, Gates provides the funding, aimed at developing countries"—with a national dimension: "Hong Kong does the fundamentals, mainland does the breeding, applied in the arid northwest."

# Beyond soybeans and rice, what else does the laboratory research? Lam Hon-ming's team also works on rice disease resistance

The shift in staple-food focus from rice to soybeans does not mean rice was abandoned. According to the research directions listed on Lam Hon-ming's member page at SKLA^※, his team also works on rice disease resistance and signalling. Rice blast, caused by the fungus Magnaporthe oryzae, is the world's number one fungal disease of rice; severe epidemics can cause massive, even total, yield losses. Mapping the genetic mechanisms of rice disease resistance and identifying resistance genes usable for molecular marker-assisted breeding is another path to yield stability that runs parallel to "stress tolerance." This line of inquiry is of a piece with the rice research of the Samuel Sun era: the laboratory's focus on "rice" has never ceased—it simply extended from "nutrition" to "disease resistance."

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# The neglected third pillar: Liwen Jiang's plant cell biology

When this laboratory is discussed, outside attention is almost entirely absorbed by the two crops, soybean and rice, and its third pillar—plant cell biology—is easily overlooked. The scholar upholding this pillar is another core investigator at the laboratory, Professor Liwen Jiang (蒋礼文), whose work is supported by a Mong Man Wai endowment.

If Samuel Sun and Lam Hon-ming research "which gene makes a crop better," Liwen Jiang investigates a more fundamental question: how are proteins transported and sorted inside plant cells? According to a CUHK official press release^※, Jiang's team discovered a previously overlooked novel organelle—EXPO (exocyst-positive organelle). It is responsible for an "unconventional" protein secretion pathway in plant cells, one function of which is to release antimicrobial substances to combat pathogens. This is an original discovery widely cited by international peers in the field of plant cell biology.

Jiang subsequently organised this research on cellular mechanisms into a university-level platform. According to the same press release, the Centre for Organelle Biogenesis and Function, which he leads, received approximately HK$47 million in funding under the sixth round of the Research Grants Council's Areas of Excellence scheme. He himself was awarded a Croucher Senior Research Fellowship (2009–2010). He offered a direct statement about the industrial prospects for his research:

"Our research has potential applications for the biotech industry in Hong Kong and the mainland—it could enhance the value of plants as biofuel feedstocks and boost crop productivity in high-stress environments."

This remark pinpoints the connection between this "third pillar" of cell biology and the other two: plant bioreactors—that is, engineering plant cells into "miniature factories" for producing proteins, vaccines, or industrial materials. Samuel Sun's earlier work on "seeds as bioreactors" and Liwen Jiang's dissection of protein transport pathways are, in essence, two ends of the same proposition. Three scholars, three scales of crop research (field crop, seed, organelle), together assemble the laboratory's complete research landscape.

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# Where is the laboratory's "home"? An institute and the people it trains

A State Key Laboratory is a "signboard," but the daily work of research is conducted within physical faculties, schools, and institutes. The academic home of the State Key Laboratory of Agrobiotechnology is the Institute of Plant Molecular Biology and Agricultural Biotechnology (IPMBAB), under the CUHK School of Life Sciences. According to Wikipedia^※, Samuel Sun served as director of this institute for many years; Liwen Jiang has also headed this platform. In other words, the laboratory's three pillars—seed proteins, soybean genetics, and cell biology—share the same academic roof, under which talent, equipment, and cohorts of postgraduate students circulate.

This also explains a less-discussed output of this laboratory: people. It is a research unit that publishes papers and produces plant varieties, but it is also a training ground for the next generation of plant molecular biologists. The twelve years Samuel Sun spent as founding College Master of S.H. Ho College (2006–2018), and the international conference awards won by Liwen Jiang's postgraduate students, both illustrate the "people-cultivating" side of the laboratory. For an agricultural lab housed in a city short of farmland, its most reliable "output" may, perhaps, not be any single seed, but a cohort of researchers who understand how to connect genetic research to the problem of feeding people.

# How does the "Hong Kong does fundamentals, mainland does applications" division actually work?

The core of the Partner Laboratory system is a phrase often quoted but rarely unpacked: "complementary advantages." When applied concretely to the State Key Laboratory of Agrobiotechnology, it becomes more tangible.

According to CUHK Research's partner laboratory page^※, the laboratory's strategic design is to connect Hong Kong's advantages in global networking, international talent, and modern management with the mainland's strengths in economic scale, research capacity, and natural resources. This is not empty words: Samuel Sun's lysine rice project required connecting to the international network of the Gates Foundation and laboratories across four countries and six institutions—this was facilitated by the Hong Kong side. Lam Hon-ming's stress-tolerant soybeans needed regional trials on the arid Loess Plateau of Gansu and the subsequent development of the Long Huang series of cultivars—this relied on the mainland side. This Hong Kong laboratory functions more like the "upstream engine" of an entire chain—generating genes, mechanisms, and germplasm lines—which are then handed off to partner mainland institutions and provincial academies of agricultural sciences for breeding and dissemination.

This division of labour also has its natural constraints. Hong Kong lacks farmland and the conditions for large-scale field trials, which means the lab can hardly complete every step "from gene to table" on its own; it must rely on the partner mechanism to outsource the downstream work. Conversely, precisely because it concentrates on the upstream, it can focus its limited research resources on the foundational stages that most demand international perspective and precision instruments. With China Agricultural University as its primary partner, and collaborations with institutions including the China National Hybrid Rice R&D Centre, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, the laboratory forms precisely such a collaborative network: "Hong Kong's brains, the mainland's land."

One thread in this collaborative network can even be traced back to before the laboratory's establishment. According to Wikipedia^※, as early as 1999, Samuel Sun was already collaborating with Yuan Longping, the "father of hybrid rice," using molecular genetics techniques to improve the quality of hybrid rice and conducting functional genomics research on rice and soybeans. The institution listed as the "China National Hybrid Rice R&D Centre" was precisely the one headed by Yuan Longping. In other words, the laboratory's later connection with mainland rice research was not an empty shell partnership decreed by administrative fiat, but a continuation built upon the founding director's own authentic, early-career scientific relationships. Institutional partnerships are often woven first by individual scientists' collaborations, before being fixed in place by formal structures. This adds a layer of human texture to the term "Partner Laboratory."

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# A renaming in 2025—what does it mean? From "State Key Laboratory" to "National Key Laboratory"

If you were to look up this laboratory's formal name in 2026, you would find it in the final stages of a nationwide institutional adjustment—the words on the signboard are in the process of changing from "State Key Laboratory" to "National Key Laboratory."

This is not a matter for CUHK alone, but part of a nationwide restructuring of State Key Laboratories launched on the mainland in 2022. According to a China News report^※, the Innovation and Technology Commission of the Hong Kong SAR Government initiated the restructuring of Hong Kong laboratories at the end of 2023. In January 2025, the Ministry of Science and Technology approved the applications of 15 Hong Kong laboratories, which are to be uniformly renamed "National Key Laboratories" and officially began operating on 1 July 2025. On 25 August 2025, the 15 National Key Laboratories were presented with plaques at the Central Government Offices, with the Chief Executive, John Lee Ka-chiu; the Minister of Science and Technology, Yin Hejun; and the Director of the Liaison Office of the Central People's Government in Hong Kong, Zhou Ji, in attendance. The report stated that the 15 laboratories are affiliated with HKU, CUHK, HKUST, PolyU, and CityU, "covering research fields such as medicine, agriculture, the ecological environment, and physics."

The State Key Laboratory of Agrobiotechnology is precisely the bearer of the "agriculture" category among them. According to a 2025 CUHK announcement^※, CUHK had a total of four state key laboratories presented with plaques in this round, among which the Agrobiotechnology laboratory is led by Professor Lam Hon-ming. In the same batch, CUHK also newly established a State Key Laboratory of Quantum Information Technologies and Materials. Viewing this agricultural laboratory within that picture—"agriculture and quantum receiving plaques side-by-side"—niftily reflects the overall evolution of CUHK's national laboratory landscape "from agriculture, medicine, and chemistry, to quantum" (for details, see CUHK's Research Establishment).

This restructuring brought more than just a name change. According to the China News report, each restructured laboratory will continue to receive an annual grant of HK$20 million from the SAR government, with the host university required to provide additional matching support of no less than HK$4 million each year. Approved laboratories must set out a five-year work plan, with milestones and performance indicators, and submit annual progress reports. This means that "National Key Laboratory" is not just a new signboard; it's about integrating Hong Kong's national laboratories into a management framework that places greater emphasis on "solving the scientific problems behind major national needs" and places more weight on assessment and output.

The bar for this new framework is not low. According to a Legislative Council Panel on Commerce, Industry, Innovation and Technology discussion paper^※, beyond the 15 approved applications in this round, another 7 were rejected. The Innovation and Technology Commission attributed this to reasons including "the research team is relatively small in scale, the research objectives still need to be refined, and the research directions are fragmented." Of the 15 approved, 12 were restructured from existing State Key Laboratories, and 3 were newly established. The Agrobiotechnology laboratory passed smoothly, buoyed by the accumulated achievements of its two directors and its clear "food security" positioning—in a way, it serves as a positive footnote for those three unspoken criteria: "team scale, refined objectives, and focused direction." It has never lacked a mission that can be summed up in a single sentence.

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# The dual identity of one laboratory: facing the world, facing the nation

Looking at the three individuals—Samuel Sun, Lam Hon-ming, and Liwen Jiang—set alongside this string of years, the character of the State Key Laboratory of Agrobiotechnology becomes clear: it is a laboratory with a dual identity.

Its world-facing side is inscribed in its international collaborations—Samuel Sun's lysine rice connected to the Gates Foundation and six labs across four countries; Liwen Jiang's organelle research published in top international journals; the laboratory's genomic data open to scientists worldwide. Its nation-facing side is inscribed in its institutional structure and on-the-ground applications—it is a node within the national laboratory system, partnered with China Agricultural University, its outcomes flowing to the saline-alkali soils of Gansu, and in 2025 it was restructured into a new management framework alongside the entire system of national key laboratories.

These two identities are not in conflict; rather, they are mutually conditional. Precisely because it possesses Hong Kong's international networks and talent, the nation incorporated it into the system and granted it a "national-level" platform. And precisely because it plugs into the nation's scale and resources, a single gene discovered in a Hong Kong laboratory can potentially become a soybean seed actually planted by a farmer in the arid northwest. From the lysine inside a seed to the two nameplates on one laboratory, this thread tells the same story—connecting Hong Kong's basic research to the nation's food agenda.

Related reading: Salt-tolerant Soybeans: From Gene to the Saline-Alkali Soils of Gansu, CUHK's Research Establishment: State Key Labs, InnoHK Centres, and University-level Institutes, Research Achievement Overview, Breakthroughs in Life Sciences and Medicine.

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