1. The development of new pesticides with chitin as the target

Chitin is the extracellular polymer of N -acetylglucosamine units widely found among insects, fungi, and oomycetes. Since chitin is absent in plants and vertebrates, enzymes specifically involved in its biosynthesis and metabolism present promising targets for pest and disease management. A recent study by the Yang Qing Lab reported the cryo-EM structure of a chitin synthase protein from the soybean root rot pathogen Phytophthora sojae  (PsChs1), providing a structural biology explanation of the directional nature of the chitin polymer elongation process. It further explains the structural mechanism of chitin synthase inhibition by a competitive inhibitor, nikkomycin, revealing the potential of developing a novel class of eco-friendly pesticides targeting chitin biosynthesis.

2. Building precise invasive biological identification and monitoring technology

Invasive alien plants (IAPs) are considered to be among the greatest global threats to biodiversity and ecosystems. Timely and effective monitoring is important for their prevention and control. Fanghao wan‘s using unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) as intelligent monitoring to acquire colour images,and using a novel IAPsNet based on a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) to identify the IAPs appearing in the images.Through training and testing,the IAPsNet reaching an accuracy of 93.39% within a time of 1.8846 s .Moreover, in quantitative and qualitative comparative analysis, IAPsNet not only has high accuracy, high recall, high precision, high F1-score and efficiency but also has a high anti-interference capacity against blur, environment and multi-scales.More than 120 IAPs can be monitored in real time. Additional, wan’s Lab exploit the online insect by two-stage image segmentation strategy identification system which can locate and identify the target pest accurately , the factors such as small target size, high similarity between species and complex backgrounds can be excluded,It can accurately identify more than 100 species of pests.