The Top 10 Advances in China's Life Sciences in 2021 were released

What new mysteries of life science will be solved by Chinese scientists in 2021? What secrets have been revealed about the coronavirus? What new medical breakthroughs offer hope for cancer treatment? Synthetic starch, COVID-19 prevention and control, nasopharyngeal cancer treatment and other achievements were included in the "Top 10 Advances in Life Sciences in China" for 2021, released by the Life Sciences Association of China Association for Science and Technology on Thursday. Compared with the previous selection, the selected results are more original, providing new ideas for the development of new life science technologies, new medical breakthroughs and the development of bioeconomy, showing the social impact of life science and related technologies.

Food brought about a subversive revolution in food production

Food is the life of the people. Eating well is the common pursuit of people, but the current food production is still inseparable from "relying on the sky to eat", what changes can life science and technology have, so as to provide new solutions for "food"? Of the ten major advances, two are related to "food".

Starch is the most important component of grain and also an important industrial raw material. Could we skip farming and make starches in the lab? The selected "Artificial synthesis from carbon dioxide to starch" is the first time in the world to achieve artificial synthesis of starch, which will have a transformative impact on the next generation of biological manufacturing and agricultural production. The research, carried out by the Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in collaboration with the Dalian Institute of Chemical Compounds and other units, subverted the complex process of starch synthesis in plants, surpassing the energy efficiency and speed of crops such as corn, and opened a window for the workshop manufacturing of starch. The study caused an international outcry and was considered a landmark breakthrough.

As one of the staple food in our country, rice has always been paid much attention to improve its yield. In 2021, Chinese scientists have made new breakthroughs in rice breeding. Li Jiayang's team at the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences first proposed a new strategy for rapid de nuo domestication of allotetraploid wild rice, and successfully created new tetraploid rice materials with different types of improved grain dropping, awning, plant height, grain length, stalk thickness, growth period, etc., breaking through all technical bottlenecks. This achievement opens up a new breeding direction, provides a new feasible path to deal with the future food crisis, and is expected to bring a subversive revolution to world food production.

The fight against COVID-19 has brought hope to the prevention and treatment of the disease

Two studies on the fight against the epidemic, "Study on the mechanism of the novel coronavirus escape host natural immunity and antiviral drugs" and "cross-species recognition and molecular mechanism of coronavirus", are of great significance to the complex situation of the international community today.

At present, the novel coronavirus pneumonia epidemic has lasted for two years, and the continuous emergence of mutant strains poses an urgent need for the development of broad-spectrum drugs. The "transcriptional replication complex" consists of viral replicase, which is responsible for the whole process of viral transcription and replication. It is highly conserved in each mutant strain and is the core target of developing broad-spectrum drugs. The research group of Academician Rao Zihe and Professor Lou Zhiyong of Tsinghua University has discovered and reconstructed the complete composition of the novel coronavirus transcription and replication machine for the first time in the world, providing a new target for the development of novel and safe broad-spectrum antiviral drugs, and providing a key scientific basis for optimizing antiviral drugs targeting polymerase.

In the last 20 years, humanity has suffered three major outbreaks caused by coronaviruses. Most coronavirus that infect humans come from animals, and the virus is often delayed in human-to-human transmission, and the threshold of disease prevention and control needs to move forward in "time". Therefore, in the top ten progress selected this time, another study on epidemic prevention focuses on preventing the outbreak caused by the new coronavirus.

The study, conducted by Gao Fu and his team at the Institute of Microbiology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, established efficient methods to evaluate the cross-species recognition ability of coronaviruses, and used these methods to evaluate the potential risk of cross-species transmission of bat-derived coronaviruses and pangolin-derived coronaviruses, and found that the above three coronaviruses have the potential risk of cross-species transmission. It is suggested that we should continue to monitor the coronavirus of animal origin.