Prof. Ying Zhang is the director of the Fruit Germplasm Improvement Research Center, the leader of the grape and breeding innovation team, and a visiting scholar at the University of Verona, Italy. In 2009, he graduated from the Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences with a Ph.D. in biochemistry and molecular biology. After graduation, he joined the Fruit Germplasm Improvement Research Center of the Zhengzhou Fruit Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and has worked there ever since. He is mainly engaged in grape genome assembly, precise resource identification, gene mining for important agronomic traits, and grape molecular breeding technology research. He has established a grape-distant hybridization population and created a batch of excellent germplasm resources. He has completed the sequencing and assembly of the grape white rot genome and obtained the effector protein of the pathogen for the first time. The grape seedless SSR markers he excavated have an accuracy rate of 94% in natural populations. He has made breakthrough research progress in grape resistance genetic breeding, grape genome, GWAS, etc., and has a certain influence in the industry.
Prof. ChongHuai Liu graduated from China Agricultural University in 1987 and is currently a researcher and doctoral supervisor at the Zhengzhou Fruit Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences. He is the head of the Zhengzhou Grape Nursery of the National Fruit Germplasm, the director of the National Grape Industry Technology System Research Laboratory, and the vice president of the Grape Branch of the Chinese Society of Agronomy. He has been a senior visiting scholar at the University of Guelph in Canada and the Aegean University in Turkey. He has been engaged in research on grape germplasm resources and genetic breeding for a long time.
