News comes that two research programs of Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden (XTBG) will be financially supported by the joint fund of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) and Yunnan Province (NSFC-Yunnan Joint Fund for short).

The two programs are named “Molecular biological dissection and breeding utilization of stem branch trait in Oryza rufipogon” and “Study on molecular mechanism of compound leaf pattern formation in Medicago truncatula”. Prof. Yu Diqiu and Prof. Chen Jianghua are principal investigators of the two programs respectively.

Till now, the application for financial support from NSFC in 2017 comes to an end and XTBG got fruitful results.

XTBG researchers have applied 86 projects for funding from NSFC in 2017 and got 34 projects financially supported, which is 21.43% higher than 2016. Among them, two are supported by NSFC-Yunnan Joint Fund, 16 are general programs, 10 youth programs, five supported by research fund for international young scientists, and one international program.

This year, the ratio of supported programs of XTBG is about 40%, which ranks first in Yunnan region and front nationwide.

Importantly, six researchers with XTBG as their host institution applied for the Research Fund for International Young Scientists in 2017 and five of them got supported. The rate of financial support of the fund reaches 83%, which ranks 6^th nationwide.

 It is a proof showing that XTBG has established an international research team.