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

The one-line takeaway: CUHK's State Key Laboratory of Agrobiotechnology was established in 2008 with approval from the Ministry of Science and Technology, with China Agricultural University as its partner institution. Its two directors, Samuel Sun Sai-Man and Lam Hon-Ming, focused on rice and soybean respectively, and in 2025 the laboratory was reorganised and renamed a "National Key Laboratory."

This article is a factual archive entry for the reference section (04 Research), carrying no credibility badges, with every claim individually sourced to official or academic references. The academics named are public figures, and are identified by name in accordance with publicly available information. It takes a different angle on this laboratory — looking not at the details of individual research outputs, but at the people at the helm and the institutional scaffolding beneath them: who built it, who took over, and how it connects to mainland China and the world. The full scientific journey of salt-tolerant soybean, from gene to Gansu field, is covered separately in Salt-Tolerant Soybean: From Gene to the Saline-Alkali Soils of Gansu; the wider landscape of CUHK's state key laboratories appears in CUHK's Research Infrastructure.

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

Hong Kong has no great expanse of farmland, yet it hosts a national-level agricultural laboratory — that alone is worth a "why." The answer lies in a distinctive institutional form: the Partner Laboratory.

The door to national key laboratories in Hong Kong's universities opened gradually after the handover. According to a Biotech Channel report^※, in October 2005 the University of Hong Kong unveiled its first two state key laboratories — in "Emerging Infectious Diseases" and "Brain and Cognitive Sciences" — the only state key laboratories outside mainland China at the time. Places then spread to other institutions. CUHK successively won approval in fields including translational oncology (2006) and agrobiotechnology (2008). Most of these laboratories took the "Partner Laboratory" form, pairing with a mainland host institution — the Hong Kong side contributing international networks, talent and management, the mainland side contributing scale, resources and application scenarios, the two ends together forming a complete research unit.

The State Key Laboratory of Agrobiotechnology (SKLA) is exactly such a unit. According to the CUHK research page^※, it was approved in 2008 by mainland China's Ministry of Science and Technology, with China Agricultural University as its partner unit. Its rationale is not "Hong Kong needs to farm" but "Hong Kong's molecular biology capacity meets the nation's food-security agenda." According to CUHK Research's Partner Laboratory page^※, the laboratory's mission is framed as using molecular biotechnology to "raise yields and improve the nutritional value of rice and other crops and ensure food security," by combining "the traditional wisdom of farmers and plant breeders" with modern biotechnology.

For what it's worth, agrobiotechnology is not CUHK's only national-level presence in the "plant" direction. According to the same wave of expansion described in the Biotech Channel report^※, CUHK subsequently gained approval in November 2009 for a state key laboratory in Chinese medicine and plant resources related to "protection and utilisation of plant resources in South and Southwest China," holding the "crops" and "medicinal plants" lines respectively. The two laboratories side by side sketch out CUHK's overall approach of taking its disciplinary strength in "plants" and splitting it into the food and medicinal tracks, grafting each onto national needs. This article focuses on the agrobiotechnology line; on the plant-resources side, the authoritative listing is the CUHK state key laboratory list^※.

This institutional backdrop determines the order of what follows: first, the man who built the laboratory.

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# Who built it? Founding Director Samuel Sun

The founding director of the State Key Laboratory of Agrobiotechnology was Professor Samuel Sun Sai-Man (辛世文). His name occupies a particular place in Hong Kong science — he was among the first agricultural biotechnologists in Hong Kong's academic world to be elected to the Chinese Academy of Engineering, and is known in mainland academic circles as the "father of plant gene cloning."

According to Wikipedia^※, Sun was born on 15 September 1942 in Chikan, Guangzhou Bay (today Chikan District, Zhanjiang, Guangdong), graduated from the Biology Department of New Asia College at The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1966, and went on to the United States, earning a PhD in plant biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin in 1974. He served as chief scientist and head of the molecular biology division at ARCO Plant Cell Research Institute in the US, then as full professor of plant molecular physiology at the University of Hawaii, before returning to CUHK in the 1990s as Professor and Chairman of the Biology Department. According to the Chinese Academy of Engineering membership profile^※, he was elected to the Academy in 2003. After returning to CUHK, he also served as founding Master of S.H. Ho College (from 2006 to 2018), tying the later stretch of his research career to college education.

Sun's scientific signature is protein in seeds. According to the Chinese Academy of Engineering profile^※ and Wikipedia^※, in his early years in the US he became known for cloning plant genes and revealing plant gene introns, which is why mainland academics dubbed him the "father of plant gene cloning." He later directed this foundational capability at a concrete livelihood problem: people whose staple food is rice broadly lack the essential amino acid lysine, because rice seeds contain little of it. According to his Academy CV, he used gene-transfer techniques to raise the essential-amino-acid content of seed protein substantially — by roughly thirty per cent — and from this developed lysine-rich rice. From "making seeds store a bit more good protein" to "giving poor countries' children a bit less malnutrition," this strand of research became one of the earliest flagship projects of the State Key Laboratory of Agrobiotechnology.

One note on the name itself: the founding director's Chinese name (辛世文) is occasionally miswritten in popular and some secondary sources as other homophones. The authoritative form is "辛世文" as recorded in the Chinese Academy of Engineering profile^※ — he is the founder who carried this laboratory from its days as a Centre of Excellence to a state key laboratory, and a key figure in bringing Hong Kong's molecular biology reputation into the national agricultural science and technology system.

# Why is Sun's lysine-rich rice connected to the Gates Foundation?

Because at the time, the development of biofortified crops was choke-held by patents held by a handful of multinational seed companies, and a philanthropic foundation wanted to reopen that path for the developing world. According to a CUHK 2008 press release^※, the laboratory launched an international collaboration funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation at HK$88 million, uniting six laboratories from four countries to work on raising the nutritional value of rice. The project landed on Sun's long-cultivated seed-protein platform — connecting the basic-research ability "to make seeds store a bit more good protein" to the real-world need of "giving poor countries' children a bit less malnutrition."

Sun's articulation of the laboratory's founding purpose was recorded officially. According to another 2008 CUHK press release^※, he stressed that the laboratory would "combine traditional breeding wisdom with modern biotechnology to develop new rice varieties with higher output and nutritional value," because rice is the staple food of roughly half the world's population. That sentence set the tone for the laboratory: not some dazzling frontier esoterica, but biotechnology brought down to "one 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 talent base and funding foundation came from an earlier grant by the University Grants Committee (UGC).

According to the CUHK 2008 press release^※, Sun had led CUHK's UGC Areas of Excellence Centre for Plant and Agricultural Biotechnology since 2000; the centre was funded twice under the UGC's Areas of Excellence (AoE) scheme, receiving over HK$63 million over a decade. The approval of the state key laboratory effectively upgraded this long-running research platform and hung a "national" label on it. The laboratory was approved on 2 April 2008 and officially inaugurated on 13 December that year.

This path — Centre of Excellence first, state key laboratory second — also explains why the laboratory had presentable projects from day one: the Gates Foundation's lysine rice and the later soybean genome were not products built from zero by a new laboratory, but continuations of existing teams' years of accumulated work.

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

A laboratory's quality is half about how it starts and half about how it passes the baton. The second-generation head of the State Key Laboratory of Agrobiotechnology is Professor Lam Hon-Ming — the current director and the man who carried the laboratory from its "rice era" into its "soybean era."

According to the CUHK research page^※, the laboratory is now directed by Lam. Since returning to CUHK in 1997, he has worked continuously on soybean stress tolerance, with a key conceptual turn: going back to wild soybean — cultivated soybean, through long artificial selection, has lost some stress-resistance genes in domestication, while wild soybean retains a richer pool of stress-resistance genetic resources. Along this line, the team resequenced 31 soybean genomes, cloned the salt-tolerance gene GmCHX1, completed the world's first reference-grade wild soybean genome, extended stress-tolerant varieties to Gansu's saline-alkali soils, and sent rhizobia to the Chinese space station. This whole scientific journey from gene to field to space is covered in detail elsewhere in this archive in Salt-Tolerant Soybean: From Gene to the Saline-Alkali Soils of Gansu, and will not be repeated here.

From Sun to Lam, the laboratory's staple-crop focus shifted quietly: from rice's "nutritional enhancement" to soybean's "stress-tolerance breeding." The two lines are not mutually exclusive — rice covers "eating well," soybean covers "growing even in bad soil" — and together they key into the laboratory's overarching proposition of "food security." The handover between two generations also layered onto the laboratory's early internationalism ("Hong Kong does the basic science, Gates pays, the developing world benefits") an additional national dimension ("Hong Kong does the basic science, mainland China does the breeding, the landings are in the arid northwest").

# Beyond soybean and rice: Lam's team and rice disease resistance

The staple focus shifting from rice to soybean does not mean rice has been set aside. According to the research directions listed on Lam's member page at SKLA^※, the team also works on rice disease resistance and signal transduction alongside soybean. Rice blast (caused by the fungus Magnaporthe oryzae) is the world's number-one fungal disease of rice; in severe epidemics it can cause widespread or even total crop loss — understanding the genetic mechanisms of rice disease resistance and identifying resistance genes usable in marker-assisted breeding is a parallel path to stable yields alongside stress tolerance. This thread runs directly from the Sun era: the laboratory's attention to "rice" has never lapsed, merely extended from "nutrition" to "disease resistance."

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

When people talk about this laboratory, nearly all attention is absorbed by the two crops, soybean and rice — which makes it easy to miss its third pillar: plant cell biology. Holding up that pillar is another core scholar of the laboratory, Professor Jiang Liwen (蒋礼文), who holds the Choh-Ming Li chair in life sciences.

If Sun and Lam study "which gene makes a crop better," Jiang studies a more foundational question: how proteins are transported and sorted inside plant cells. According to a CUHK press release^※, Jiang's team discovered a previously overlooked new organelle — EXPO (exocyst-positive organelle) — which is responsible for a "non-classical" protein secretion pathway in plant cells, one of whose functions is releasing antimicrobial substances to fight pathogens. It is an original discovery in plant cell biology widely cited by international peers.

Jiang organised this cellular-mechanism research further into a university-level platform. According to the same press release, the Centre for Organelle Biogenesis and Function he leads received around HK$47 million under the sixth round of the Research Grants Council's Areas of Excellence scheme; he himself was awarded the Croucher Senior Research Fellowship (2009–2010). On the industrial prospects of this work, he has a direct statement:

"Our research has potential applications in the biotechnology industries of Hong Kong and mainland China — both in enhancing the value of plants as feedstock for biofuels and in strengthening crop productivity under high-stress environments."

That sentence points to the junction between cell biology, the "third pillar," and the other two: the plant bioreactor — turning plant cells into "mini-factories" for producing proteins, vaccines or industrial materials. Sun's "seeds as bioreactors" of the old days and Jiang's dissection of protein transport pathways are essentially two ends of the same proposition. Three scholars, three scales of plant (field crop, seed, organelle), complete the laboratory's research map.

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# Where does the laboratory "live"? An institute and the people it trains

A state key laboratory is a "plaque," but day-to-day research happens in substantive faculties and institutes. The academic home of the State Key Laboratory of Agrobiotechnology is the Institute of Plant Molecular Biology and Agricultural Biotechnology (IPMBAB), under CUHK's School of Life Sciences. According to Wikipedia^※, Sun served for a long period as the Institute's director; Jiang has also headed the platform. In other words, the laboratory's three pillars — seed protein, soybean genes, cell biology — share one academic roof, with people, instruments and graduate cohorts circulating within it.

This also explains a less-discussed output of the laboratory: people. It is at once a research unit that publishes papers and releases varieties, and a training ground for the next generation of plant molecular biologists. Sun's twelve years as founding Master of S.H. Ho College (2006–2018) and Jiang's graduate students repeatedly winning international conference awards are sidelong glimpses of the laboratory's "educating" side. For an agricultural laboratory sitting in a city without farmland, its most stable "output" may well not be any particular seed, but a cohort of researchers who know how to connect genetic research to food-security propositions.

# How exactly does the "Hong Kong does basic science, mainland does application" division work?

The core of the Partner Laboratory system is a phrase often quoted but rarely unpacked: "complementary strengths." Applied to the State Key Laboratory of Agrobiotechnology, it can be seen quite concretely.

According to CUHK Research's Partner Laboratory page^※, the laboratory's strategic design pairs Hong Kong's advantages in global connectivity, international talent and modern management with mainland China's advantages in economic scale, research scope and natural resources. This is not empty talk: Sun's lysine-rich rice plugging into the Gates Foundation and a six-laboratory, four-country international network relies on the Hong Kong end; Lam's stress-tolerant soybean doing regional trials on the Loess Plateau drylands of Gansu and producing the Longhuang series of varieties relies on the mainland end. Hong Kong's laboratory functions as the "upstream engine" of the whole chain — producing genes, mechanisms and germplasm, which the mainland partner institution and provincial academies of agricultural sciences then carry through breeding and extension.

This division also has its natural constraints. Hong Kong's lack of farmland and of conditions for large-scale field trials means the laboratory can hardly complete every link from "gene to fork" itself; it must pass the downstream out through the partner mechanism. Conversely, precisely because it focuses on the upstream, it can concentrate its limited research resources on the basic stages that most need international vision and precision instruments. With China Agricultural University as its principal partner, and collaborating with the China National Hybrid Rice Research and Development Center, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and others, it forms exactly such a collaboration network — "Hong Kong contributes the brains, mainland contributes the land."

One line in that network even predates the laboratory itself. According to Wikipedia^※, as early as 1999, Sun collaborated with Yuan Longping, the "father of hybrid rice," using molecular genetic techniques to improve the quality of hybrid rice and conducting functional genomic research on rice and soybean. The "China National Hybrid Rice Research and Development Center" on the list is exactly the institution Yuan directed. In other words, the laboratory's later docking with mainland rice research is not an empty administrative arrangement, but a continuation built on the founding director's own early, genuine scientific collaborations — institutional partnerships are usually first woven by individual scientists' cooperation, then fixed by the bureaucracy. That point gives "Partner Laboratory" an extra human colour.

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# What does a 2025 name change mean? From "State Key Laboratory" to "National Key Laboratory"

If you look up this laboratory's official name in 2026, you will find it at the tail end of a nationwide institutional reshuffle — the characters on the plaque are changing from "State Key Laboratory" to "National Key Laboratory."

This is not CUHK's affair alone, but part of a reorganisation of state key laboratories launched across mainland China in 2022. According to a China News Service report^※, the Hong Kong SAR government's Innovation and Technology Commission began the reorganisation of Hong Kong-based laboratories in late 2023; the national Ministry of Science and Technology approved the applications of 15 Hong Kong-based laboratories in January 2025. These laboratories are to be uniformly renamed "National Key Laboratories" and formally operating from 1 July 2025. On 25 August 2025, the 15 National Key Laboratories were presented with their plaques at the Hong Kong SAR government headquarters, with Chief Executive John Lee, Minister of Science and Technology Yin Hejun, and Zhou Ji, Director of the Liaison Office of the Central People's Government in Hong Kong, in attendance. The report says the 15 laboratories belong to the University of Hong Kong, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and City University of Hong Kong, "covering research fields including medicine, agriculture, ecology and environment, and physics."

The State Key Laboratory of Agrobiotechnology is the bearer of the "agriculture" slot among them. According to a CUHK 2025 announcement^※, CUHK had four state key laboratories presented with plaques in this round, of 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 — seeing this agricultural laboratory in the same frame as "agriculture and quantum receiving plaques side by side" neatly reflects the overall evolution of CUHK's national-laboratory portfolio "from agro-medical-chemistry to quantum" (see CUHK's Research Infrastructure).

This reorganisation brings more than a name. According to the China News Service report, after restructuring each laboratory will continue to receive HK$20 million a year from the SAR government, and its parent university must provide no less than HK$4 million a year in matching support; approved laboratories must set out five-year work plans, stage-by-stage goals and performance indicators, and submit annual progress reports. "National Key Laboratory" is thus not just a new plaque — it brings Hong Kong's national laboratories into a management framework that puts more weight on "solving the scientific questions behind major national needs" and on assessment and outputs.

The bar for this new framework is not low. According to a Legislative Council discussion paper of the Panel on Commerce and Industry and Innovation and Technology^※, beyond the 15 approved, seven applications were rejected; per the Innovation and Technology Commission, the reasons included "research teams of too-small scale, goals and positioning still needing sharpening, and fragmented research directions." Of the 15 approved, 12 were reorganised from existing state key laboratories and three were new. The agrobiotechnology laboratory, with the accumulated achievements of two generations of directors and its crisp "food security" positioning, sailed through — in a sense a positive footnote to those three invisible criteria of "team scale, sharp goals, focused directions." It has never lacked a mission that can be stated in one sentence.

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# A laboratory with a "dual identity": facing the world, and facing the nation

Put Sun, Lam and Jiang together with that string of dates, and the character of the State Key Laboratory of Agrobiotechnology comes clear: it is a laboratory with a dual identity.

The world-facing side is written in its international collaborations — Sun's lysine rice connecting to the Gates Foundation and six labs across four countries, Jiang's organelle research in top international journals, the laboratory's genomic data opened to scientists worldwide. The nation-facing side is written in its institutional form and landings — a node in the national laboratory system, with China Agricultural University as partner, outputs flowing to Gansu's saline-alkali soils, and in 2025 reorganised with the national wave into a new management framework.

These two identities do not conflict; each is the condition of the other. Precisely because Hong Kong has its international networks and talent, the nation took the laboratory into its system and gave it a "national" platform; and precisely because it plugged into the nation's scale and resources, a gene discovered in a Hong Kong laboratory can become a soybean a farmer in the northwest actually plants. From lysine in a seed to the two plaques on a laboratory door, this thread tells one story: connecting Hong Kong's basic research to the nation's food-security proposition.

Related reading: Salt-Tolerant Soybean: From Gene to the Saline-Alkali Soils of Gansu, CUHK's Research Infrastructure: State Key Laboratories, InnoHK Centres and University-Level Institutes, Overview of Research Achievements, Breakthroughs in Life Sciences and Medicine.

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