HAIKOU, July 3. /TASS/. Research teams working in the High-Tech Zone in Yazhou Bay in Sanya use the capabilities of the free trade port in China’s southernmost province to develop research in crop breeding and exploration of deep-sea resources, Sanya Ribao reported.
According to the newspaper, thanks to the construction of the free trade port, the Yazhou research cluster has transformed into a key Chinese hub for crop breeding and maritime research. National research platforms, the country’s leading universities, and research institutes are active here.
Xia Zhiqiang, deputy dean of the Sanya South Breeding Research Institute at Hainan University, noted that the region offers unique advantages for crop breeding. According to him, more than 70% of new agricultural crop varieties in China undergo accelerated breeding exactly in Hainan. His research team has developed a large language model of OryzaG3, a rice genome designed for the application of artificial intelligence (AI) technology in crop breeding. The model integrates approximately 700 million parameters and, as the developers say, is comparable in efficiency to foreign analogues with a significantly larger number of parameters, while data processing speed has increased fourfold. According to the scientist, since Hainan embraced a free trade port experiment, opportunities for international cooperation, including in the sphere of cross-border biological data exchange, have expanded, and simplified import procedures for scientific equipment and materials have been introduced.
Xia announced that the team plans to finish improving the rice genome and launch its commercial application by 2027, build a system of genomic models for major agricultural and tropical crops by 2030, and establish an international collaborative modeling network involving countries along the Belt and Road Initiative by 2035.
The newspaper also highlights the work of Shi Jingya, a research fellow at BGI-Research Sanya, who has been doing research into deep-sea microorganisms and developing a marine biological resource bank. The research team is searching for biologically active substances in microorganisms living in the deep-sea areas of the South China Sea as it is busy creating a database and sample collection that could potentially find application in pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, and the production of functional foods, the newspaper wrote. According to Shi, the Hainan Free Trade Port (HFTP) status has helped promoting international scientific cooperation, facilitated high-tech research equipment supplies, and accelerated the introduction of fundamental research results into industrial production.
Authorities in Hainan expect to transform the research hub in Sanya into a leading national center for research into crop breeding and the exploration of deep-sea biological resources, while benefiting from the free trade port policies and the concentration of research employees.