Breeding new varieties of peanuts resistant to disease and high yield in China

He walked into the plant tissue culture room of Zhang Xinyou, vice president of the Henan Academy of Agricultural Sciences, as if he had walked into a magical plant factory. There were thousands of flasks of different sizes in the space of more than 20 square meters. Some of the cultivated materials grew young stems and leaves, and some of the peanut-sized peanuts that have already produced peanuts were born from here.

Zhang Xinyou, the first person who won the second prize in the National Science and Technology Progress Award in 2011, “Extracting Research and New Breeding of Wild Peanut Wild Germplasm”. In 2000 and 2006, he had twice won the second prize for national science and technology progress.

From the mid-1980s onwards, Zhang Xinyou, who is still studying for a master's degree, began to concentrate on this research. Traditional peanut varieties have a long growing period, poor disease resistance, and low oil content. On the other hand, most of the existing 200 new peanut varieties have similar ancestry and cannot breed superior offspring. He set his sights on the wild species of peanuts. Some of them were never susceptible to disease, some had almost no insects, some had fat content as high as 63%, and some had strong drought resistance. However, because the wild species and cultivars of peanuts are "distant relatives", they belong to distant hybridization, and there is incompatibility of hybridization and infertility of offspring.

In the past 30 years, Zhang Xinyou and his team have collaborated with the Institute of Oil Crop Research of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and other institutions to finally create a large number of outstanding new germplasms and have developed 7 disease-resistant, high-quality, high-yield, and wide-adaptability. Far-range hybrid peanut new varieties have been promoted to a total of 37.64 million mu, which has achieved a major breakthrough in China's breeding technology.