Research

Studies on Gentianaceae in China —— the Second Class Prize of National Natural Science Award.

Prizewinner: He Tingnong, Liu Shangwu, Liu Jianquan, Sun Hongfa and Chen Shilong.

This study belongs to fundamental research on botany area, covering a great deal of sub-disciplines of botany. Related productions include: (1) 2 books in Chinese, 0.9 million words, (2) 2 books in English (as a co-author in one book), about 2.5 million words, (3) 72 research articles relate with new genus or species discovery, taxonomic identification, geographic distribution, embryology, anatomy, molecular phylogeny, new compound reports and resource utilization. They reported 2 new genus, 70 new species and 34 new sub-species or varieties; also, with multidisciplinary methods and based on huge scientific evidences they did worldwide analyses on the phylogeny, origin center, distribution and dispersal as well as speciation mechanisms of Gentianeae, which mainly distributes in China and is also the primarily group within Gentianaceae. The English version A Worldwide Monograph of Gentiana was the first monograph in China that had taxonomic revision for over 300 genuses, and also, it was the first monograph that revised a huge genus within which more than 2000 species were reported. Such a large scale monographic study had not been published before in alpine plant study area, and it was also very unusual even in studies on low altitude plants. They analyzed the embryonic development characteristics of 16 representative species; the results firstly indicated various reproductive adaptations for plants to adapt the severe environment in the plateau. Moreover, they analyzed the chemical constituents, pharmacodynamic effects as well as related developmental technology of over 20 new identified species for Tibetan medicine; 22 new chemical compounds were found and 4 drugs were had been developed. Also, the resource protection, drug resource discovery and quality control were also well studied surrounding these important resource plants.