Warmly celebrate the achievement of Nongda alumnus Li Zhensheng, who has been awarded the 2006 National Supreme Science and Technology Award.

Academician Li Zhensheng has been awarded the State Supreme Science and Technology Award, a great honor for Shandong Agricultural University. All of us at SDAU feel proud and honored to have such an outstanding alumnus.

In 1931, Li Zhensheng was born in the rural area of Zibo, Shandong. As a teenager, he endured three consecutive years of severe drought in Shandong—1940, 1941, and 1942—experiencing hunger and even subsisting on grass roots and tree bark, which deepened his appreciation for the value and importance of food. In 1948, drawn by the school’s policy of providing free meals, lodging, and no tuition, he enrolled at Shandong Agricultural College.

In 1951, he graduated from Shandong Agricultural College and was assigned to work at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Shortly thereafter, he transferred to the Northwest Institute of Agricultural Biology in Yangling, Shaanxi, embarking on a more than thirty-year journey of innovative research in wheat wide‑cross breeding. At that time, stripe rust was rampant in the wheat-growing regions of northwest China, causing yield losses of 20% to 30%. To identify new sources of resistance to wheat diseases, Li Zhensheng conducted wide crosses between wheat and thinopyrum elongatum, followed by backcrossing and systematic selection, coupled with cytological analysis and disease‑resistance screening. Through these efforts, he developed several high‑yielding, disease‑resistant wheat varieties, including Xiaoyan No. 4, No. 5, and No. 6. In the 1990s, he bred Xiaoyan No. 54, and in 2001, Xiaoyan No. 81. Together with other members of the Xiaoyan series and their derived lines, these cultivars have been widely planted across 300 million mu, boosting grain production by an estimated 15 billion jin, thereby demonstrating the immense potential of wide‑cross wheat breeding in agricultural practice.

Li Zhensheng leveraged blue‑grained wheat obtained through distant hybridization in wheat to establish a novel system of blue‑grained monosomic lines. In this wheat, a single spike can bear seeds of four distinct colors: dark blue, medium blue, light blue, and white. The wheat endosperm consists of nutritive cells that do not undergo meiosis; however, its color variation serves as a genetic marker, enabling the identification of the ploidy level of embryonic cells and of subsequent generations. Consequently, there is no need for microscopic examination—simply observing seed color allows one to determine the chromosome number of the progeny, thereby resolving the longstanding challenge in wheat chromosome engineering breeding, which previously required extensive chromosome analysis.

In the early 1990s, Li Zhensheng and his research team identified and screened wheat germplasm resources with high phosphorus‑use efficiency and high nitrogen‑use efficiency, laying a theoretical foundation for wheat breeding aimed at improving nitrogen and phosphorus use efficiency. Subsequently, through breeding efforts, they developed Xiaoyan 54, a high‑quality new wheat variety capable of efficiently utilizing soil‑borne nitrogen and phosphorus nutrients; this variety was included in the Ministry of Agriculture’s “Crossing” Program and has been promoted across approximately 7 million mu in provinces such as Henan and Shaanxi.