China is catching up in life science research.

Abstract

Here in this special China issue, we are presenting you 10 invited review articles contributed by life scientists working in China 1-10. This special issue is prepared with the purpose of providing readers of IUBMB Life and the international biochemistry and molecular biology community a glimpse about the current state of life science research in China. As the largest developing country, China has been striving to increase its support on scientific research, which we think is gaining momentum in the past decade. The award of part of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Chinese scientist Youyou Tu for her contribution in discovering artemisinin (known as Qinghaosu in Chinese) and dihydroartemisinin for effectively treating malaria marked the recognition of one piece of Chinese life science discovery by the international community. Prof. Tu's work on artemisinin was conducted mainly in the 1970s 11-13. Since then, China has made tremendous progresses in scientific research in general. We would like to remind the readers that IUBMB Life published a similar special issue in June 2009 (the cover of which is shown in Fig. 1) in celebration of the 21st IUBMB and 12th FAOBMB International Congress of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology held in Shanghai, China, August 2–7, 2009. This new special China issue provides the readers an update on some representative recent achievements made by Chinese biologists. Cover of the special issue of June 2009 in celebration of the 21st IUBMB and 12th FAOBMB International Congress held in Shanghai, China, August 2–7, 2009. We greatly appreciate the following colleagues for accepting our invitation in contributing a manuscript: Drs. George F. Gao (Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences), Peng Li (Tsinghua University), Duanqing Pei (Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health, Chinese Academy of Sciences), Zhengfan Jiang (Peking University), Shimin Zhao (Fudan University), Ping Zhu and Guohong Li (Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences), Peng Chen (Peking University), Ling-Ling Chen (Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences), Beili Wu (Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, Chinese Academy of Sciences) and Zengyi Chang (Peking University). We would also like to thank Prof. Angelo Azzi (Editor-in-chief of IUBMB Life) for making the proposal of preparing this special issue and Ms. Xiaoli Sun (vice Secretary-general and director of the office, Chinese Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology) for helping us to collect these manuscripts.