Behind the popularity of wheat field graduation photos
Absent from the graduation ceremony, but not absent from the scientific research site
A wheat field graduation photo is on fire.
On July 3, at the 2022 graduation ceremony and degree-granting ceremony held by the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (hereinafter referred to as "UCAS"), a photo was "named" by Academician Li Shushen, Secretary of the Party Committee and President of the UCAS.
In the photo, three students are surrounded by Liu Zhiyong, a full-time professor at the School of Modern Agriculture, UCAS and a researcher at the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Behind them is a golden wheat field that is about to mature.
The bottom right of the photo reads: June 2022, Gaoyi, Hebei.
At UCAS, 6,493 doctoral students, 6,075 master students and 371 undergraduates received degrees this year.
Some people were absent from the graduation ceremony due to scientific research tasks, and they left their last graduation memories in their respective research bases.
These three students are the representatives of them.
According to the reports of China Youth Daily and China Youth Daily, this photo quickly became popular and was reposted by new media accounts of many mainstream media, gaining more than 100,000+. Search.
Some netizens liked the students in the photo: "Writing knowledge between heaven and earth, harvesting studies in four seasons."
"This group photo captures both the scene of a bumper grain harvest and the happiness of a bumper academic harvest." Li Shushen said at the graduation ceremony, from the national germplasm resource platform to the "black soil granary" scientific and technological battle; from cultivating fine seeds to protecting cultivated land and developing marginal The land, the students really wrote their papers on the land of the motherland.
A reporter from China Youth Daily and China Youth Daily exclusively interviewed the story behind the photo.
"Graduation Mission" for Harvesting 150,000 Wheat Plants
Standing on the far left of the photo is Yang Yijun, a graduate student of the 2022 crop genetics and breeding program of the National University of Science and Technology of China.
Not long ago, he and his classmates completed an important task: they set off at 5 a.m. and pulled out more than 42,000 individual wheat plants.
For Guo Guanghao, a new doctoral graduate in 2022, this wheat field has a special memory.
From master to doctorate, he spent 7 years here.
After graduating this year, due to the epidemic prevention and control and the wheat harvest season, he and his juniors chose to stay here. The task is to collect the 150,000 wheat experimental materials planted in the base.
Pulling wheat is an important part of field trials.
In autumn, sowing will design the planting scale and planting methods of different experimental materials according to research needs.
At the harvest stage, most of the genetic research materials should be harvested as a unit, and the traits of each individual plant should be investigated. Leaf samples will be collected by ramets to extract DNA, and molecular testing will be carried out to locate the target genes of the studied traits.
"In breeding research work, selection is mutual and cruel. You are selecting materials, and the materials are also selecting you." Yang Yijun explained that if you want to study the disease resistance genes in wheat, you need to carry out artificial inoculation identification, "not simply If the weather and environmental conditions are not suitable and the identified materials do not get sick, then a year will be wasted.”
In order to find out the gene of wheat resistance to powdery mildew, Guo Guanghao has been "deadly fighting" in this wheat field for nearly 5 years.
Usually, once a wheat plant is infected with powdery mildew, white powdery mildew spots will appear on the leaves, which will cause the wheat leaves to lose water and die, which will seriously affect the photosynthesis.
To control powdery mildew, farmers can only rely on the use of pesticides, which is not only time-consuming, labor-intensive, and expensive, but also pollutes the ecological environment.
The seeds produced by a single plant of 3705 genetically isolated populations are the starting point of Guo Guanghao's research.
His mission was to find the gene that could fight powdery mildew.
But this is obviously not an easy task.
From a microscopic level, wheat has more than 100,000 genes, and it needs to be finely located step by step, approaching the target gene step by step, and completing the cloning after the target gene is found.
At that time, there were few international studies on this type of disease-resistant protein in wheat, the resources that could be used were limited, and the academic reference materials that could be provided were also very few. This was an unexplored scientific "no man's land".
Walking in the wheat field for a while, Guo Guanghao was in a trance. He always felt that the wheat field was like a desert, and it was difficult to find a grain of sand in the desert.
He could only keep on trial and error and narrow the scope, "getting closer to the truth little by little, and when he discovers it, he carefully conducts functional verification on it." At that time, he remembered the words of his mentor, "Doing scientific research. Don't just try it out."
Based on the accumulated data in the past few years, Guo Guanghao and his lab partners found a solution: they used the DNA samples of thousands of harvested wheat trees and successfully cloned powdery mildew resistance through innovative bioinformatics methods. Gene.
Subsequently, he transferred the gene into powdery mildew-susceptible wheat through transgenic technology, and carried out phenotypic identification investigations in greenhouses and fields. After repeated verifications, he successfully cloned the wheat powdery mildew resistance gene Pm5e.
The research results were published in the professional academic journal "New Phytologist".
In the chat group, the tutor sent him a sentence: Congratulations, young man, the hard days are over.
"Fruit" in the wheat field
In the eyes of many people, doing agricultural research is very hard.
In the wheat harvest season, teachers and students have to get up at 5 am and go to the ground. After the sun comes out, sometimes the outdoor temperature is about 38 degrees Celsius. The scientific research base is located in Gaoyi, Hebei, and there are no high-rise buildings within a few kilometers. You have to ride a tricycle to the market to buy.
But in the experimental base, the teacher's rigid requirement for the students is that everyone must eat an egg and drink a carton of milk every day before they can work in the fields.
No one left because they couldn't bear the hardship.
The group of young students got together to "have fun in the midst of hardship".
They summed up the four "martial arts secrets" for pulling wheat: if you love fitness, you can use a knee-bending "trick" to lift your hips and use your back to exercise your back strength; if you are small, you can use standing When pulling the wheat, the energy sinks into the dantian and concentrates on exerting force, but it is necessary to prevent the root of the wheat from being broken, which will damage the integrity of the material...
An agricultural professor from another province once came to investigate and looked at the 50-acre wheat experimental base and said, "You have a lot of work."
Accompanied by Liu Zhiyong, he said, "We have done this all the time, and a spirit has been formed and passed on."
In this wheat field, what kind of spirit is passed down? You may find traces in the growth stories of graduates.
Fu Hongkui, a young man from Xinyang, Henan, who was born in 1998, has just been admitted to the UCAS graduate school this year. After coming to the base for more than three months, he is accustomed to starting out with ropes and gauze bags and working in the fields at four or five in the morning.
During an observation, Fu Hongkui discovered a single plant with a special phenotype, and became curious for a while.
The brother told him that before making a judgment, it is necessary to rule out whether the error is caused by human factors, such as whether there are seeds from last year mixed in, or there is a problem with the planting method, etc., and then further verify through testing and other methods.
After staying at the base for 3 months, Fu Hongkui slowly realized that he wanted to "grow up" as a scientific researcher with comprehensive thinking.
Yang Yijun, who claims to be lazy and playful since childhood, has changed a lot.
When he was just doing the experiment in the field, his brother Zhang Huaizhi took him to label the wheat department. In order to classify the experiment, the label needed to be tied to the corresponding single wheat ear, and sometimes it had to be fixed with tape.
The senior brother repeatedly reminded: tape and plastic cards will damage the farmland environment. After untying the rope, be sure to take out the non-degradable materials from the wheat field.
Another habit that has been handed down is that during the harvest season, no matter which member is planting the experimental material, the members of a research group will hold a group and carry tools together to go to the field to cut wheat.
If there is a thunderstorm and the rain is pouring down, a group of graduate students dragging bags containing more than 20 kilograms of wheat and running wildly behind the harvester, several people joined forces and threw the wheat into the car.
Looking at this group of students, Liu Zhiyong remembered the time when he was a graduate student in 1993.
He studied wheat genetics and breeding under the tutelage of Sun Qixin, President of China Agricultural University.
At that time, every night, when Professor Sun was done with his work, he would "open a kitchen" for the graduate students to learn English.
Professor Sun often said that to learn the most advanced technology, we must not be afraid of difficulties, and we must do a solid job in wheat breeding.
Professor Sun also told the students that his teacher Cai Xu, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a wheat cultivation and genetic breeder, also taught them the same way.
June is the harvest season for wheat.
Students have also harvested fruit from this fertile wheat field and achieved success in their studies.
"I hope you can be ambitious and down-to-earth, discover scientific problems in production and breeding practice, overcome difficulties in scientific research, use advanced science and technology to solve scientific problems, and contribute to national food security." Liu Zhiyong told the two Graduates have high hopes and encourage them to bring their research results with them and leave the good genes of wheat in this place wherever they go.
At the graduation ceremony of UCAS, Academician Li Shushen sent a message to the graduates: I hope to be a seed, root downward and grow upward; be a star, work hard to shine and shine; be a drop of water, clear and pure, magnanimous.
In Guo Guanghao's recollection, the scientific research life in the wheat field is magnanimous and free: he once watched the wheat heading and blooming, turning yellow and knotting; he formed two teams with the teachers and classmates of the institute to play basketball games; and in the evening, they moved out of the Singing machine, put the screen on a white wall in the open air, and sing together, some people love the most popular new pants band, some people love to sing Jay Chou's songs, and some people always sing the song "Hongyan"...
After graduation, Guo Guanghao, who grew up in rural Shandong, chose to continue to engage in wheat research as a lifelong career.
He said: "Agricultural scientific research is like a practice, half is the original intention, half is overcoming difficulties."
Yang Jie, a trainee reporter from China Youth Daily and China Youth Daily