Sanwen Huang

Our lab is dedicated to applying big omics data to advance plant biology as well as to revolutionize crop breeding. We have coordinated multiple international genome projects and sequenced the genomes of cucumber, potato, and tomato, recognized as a leading team and founder in the field of vegetable genomics. We revealed the genetic basis of domestication and diversity of cucumber and tomato, setting the theoretical framework of germplasm utilization inbreeding. We elucidated the chemical and genetic basis of cucumber bitterness and tomato flavor, creating a new roadmap for breeding toward tastier vegetables.

We have launched "The Upotato Plan", which aims to transform potato from a clonally propagated, tetraploid crop to a seed propagated, diploid crop, using genomic-design breeding. Our long-term vision is to develop an international initiative that enables the supply of personalized food in a sustainable manner, which includes:

1) restore phosphate use efficiency and understand symbiotic nitrogen fixation, to enable the creation of environmentally friendly crops;

2) promote personalized food, which requires a multidisciplinary team to identify human genes for food preference and metabolism, to reveal the interaction between gut metagenome and human genes, to design ethnic protocols to allow appropriate use of personal information on food and nutrition.