On March 22, a paper, written by a research group led by Li Hui from School of Biological Science and Technology of University of Jinan(UJN), and scientists from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Mississippi State University, as well as the National Key Laboratory of Crop Genetic Improvement of Huazhong Agricultural University, was published in The Plant Journal (impact factor 5.775) and entitled “Leveraging GWAS data to identify metabolic pathways and networks involved in maize lipid biosynthesis” (doi: 10.1111/tpj.14282).

It reported that the Pathway-based approach paved a way to evaluate the cumulative effect between multiple SNPs and target traits in the lipid metabolism and make an in-depth analysis of the dynamic balance of lipid synthesis, transformation and decomposition, laying a theoretical foundation for efficiently genetic improvement of high lipid maize. This is another important progress made by Li Hui in the analysis of genetic   mechanism of maize lipid based on her previous work in genome-wide association (Li et al., Nature Genetics, 2013).

Li Hui, winner of the Joint Fund of Excellent Young Talents in Provincial Universities of Shandong Province, is the first author, the UJN the first author unit, and Professor Marilyn of the U.S. Department of Agriculture the corresponding author of the paper. The project was funded by the national key R&D program and the general project of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC). The achievements made by this research offer a positive demonstration and play a leading role in the international cooperation of life sciences in UJN.