Two forty-years for researches on sexual plant reproduction in Wuhan University

Abstract

<p indent="0mm">Investigations on sexual plant reproduction in Wuhan University was promoted by Prof. Hong-Yuan Yang and Prof. Chang Zhou. After forty-years’ effort remarkable progress has been made in experimental sexual reproductive biology, especially in the field of unfertilized ovule culture and <italic>in vitro</italic> sexual cell manipulation. Their contributions in this field have been summarized in a Prof. Yang-edited book named “forty-year researches on experimental sexual plant reproduction”, which is a remarkable indicator of the transition from traditional descriptive sexual plant reproduction to experimental sexual plant reproduction in China. As a student of Prof. Yang, Prof. Meng-xiang Sun has been also working in this field for forty years and experienced a quick transition from sexual plant reproductive biology to developmental biology of sexual plant reproduction, in which regulatory mechanism of sexual reproduction process is deeply investigated under the guidance of basic theory of developmental biology and based on the combination of molecular and cell biological techniques. After years’ effort they finally catch up with the moving frontier of the field and add new pages in the book of sexual plant reproduction research in Wuhan University. This paper summarizes what they experienced, what they thought and what they did in the two overlapped forty-years respectively, to present some aspects of the researches in Wuhan University.