FANG RONGXIANG Fang Rongxiang, a plant virologist and an expert in plant biotechnology, was born in Shanghai in 1946. He graduated from the Department of Chemistry of Fudan University in 1967. He has been working in Institute of Microbiology (IOM), Chinese Academy of Sciences since 1968 and became a senior research fellow in 1990. He was the director of IOM from 2000 to 2004 and now serves as the director of the National Key Laboratory of Plant Genomics. He was elected the academician of Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2003. He has been conducting basic and applied research in plant virology and plant biotechnology. In 1985, he published the complete genome sequence of the Xinjiang strain of Cauliflower mosaic virus (CaMV), the first plant virus to be sequenced in China. Later on he cloned and sequenced the coat protein gene of a number of plant viruses. He also completed the wholegenome sequence analysis on Rice yellow stunt rhabdovirus, revealing a new gene in the virus not present in other rhabdoviruses. In this virus, he further identified a protein with a function in virus celltocell movement, representing the first example of viral movement proteins of plant rhabdoviruses. In plant biotechnology, he successfully developed the transgenic tobacco plants resistant to both Tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) and Cucumber mosaic virus (CMV) by simultaneously expressing TMV and CMV coat proteins in plants. The transgenic tobacco plants were planted as early as 1992 at the largest scale in the world at that time. The same strategy was later applied to produce virusresistant chili pepper which was granted a license for commercialization in 2001. In the field of plant gene expression, he analyzed and improved the CaMV 35S promoter which has been widely used in plant molecular biology and plant biotechnology. He dissected the promoter of the rice cell wall glycinerich protein gene and identified the DNA sequence responsible for vascular tissuespecific expression of the promoter. At the translational level of gene expression, he found that fusion of a CMV coat protein polypeptide can significantly augment expression of foreign proteins in higher plants, and further developed a more useful strategy by fusing the CMV peptide and the ubiquitin monomer in tandem with the foreign protein, allowing release of the foreign protein in its natural form in plant cells.    So far, he has published more than 60 papers and received two FirstClass and three SecondClass CAS Awards for S&T Progress and a SecondClass Award for S&T Progress granted by Hunan Provincial government.