AWARDEE OF LIFE SCIENCES PRIZE

HONG MENGMIN

Abstract

Hong Mengmin, research professor at Shanghai Institute of Plant Physiology of Chinese Academy of Sciences, was born on January 1, 1931 in Linhai, Zhejiang Province. He graduated from the Shanghai Medical College in 1953, and was elected as a Member of Chinese Academy of Science in 1991.
He has engaged in the research work on the areas of microbial and plant molecular genetics. His major scientific contributions came from following projects. (1) Molecular dissection of multiple drug resistant plasmids and transposons harbored in clinical pathogenic bacteria. (2) Isolation of two immunologically unrelated pili genes, K88 and K99, from non-conjugative plasmids harbored by local enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli,and construction of a recombinant plasmid containing these two genes. These two pili antigenes produced by transformant of non-pathogenic E.coli cells were effective in preventing diarrheal disease in piglets. (3) Elucidation of the molecular mechanism controlling the rice eating quality. In this project,  Prof. Hong and his coworkers found that the excision efficiency of intron 1 from Waxy gene transcript played an important role in determining the amylose content in rice emdosperm, and that the naturally occurred G→T single base mutation at the exon 1 and intron 1 junction might affect the efficiency of this intron 1 splicing.
He has published more than 80 scientific papers, and received two first class and one second class Awards of Chinese Academy of Sciences.