History

In 1992, the National Center for Gene Research (NCGR) was established jointly by the Ministry of Science and Technology, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), and the Shanghai local government to provide a major focus in China for mapping and sequencing the rice genome, and genomes of other organisms.

Since 1998 NCGR has been a member of the International Rice Genome Sequencing Project (IRGSP) to completely sequence the entire rice japonica genome. NCGR has been fully working on the chromosome 4 sequencing in close collaboration with the IRGSP members, the Chinese National Human Genome Center at Shanghai, and Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology of CAS.

From the year of 2007 on, based on previous research achievements and with the new generation sequencing technology, NCGR is focused on rice genome re-sequencing for genotyping, genome-wide association studies (GWAS) to identify common genetic factors, comparative genome and corresponding systemic comparative transcriptome analysis.

NCGR has a staff size of 42, consists of three research groups: Sequencing Department, Large Scale Platform, Bioinformatics Department. And over 50 million base pairs of rice genomic DNA sequences are now in the public database.