Rice has traditionally been a staple diet and backbone of the Chinese economy but now, the Faculty of Life and Physical Sciences at The University of Western Australian is sharing its expertise in plant molecular biology with the Chinese in what can potentially lead to the country's greatest life science and agricultural research and development.

This partnership brings together UWA's plant energy biology centre and Zhejiang University's (ZJU) plant genomics laboratory. ZJU is not only one of China's most prestigious universities but also hosts the country's Key Research Laboratory in Plant Science. Fittingly, Zhejiang Province was the first place in China to cultivate rice.

The joint lab will be called the UWA-ZJU Laboratory of Functional Plant Genomics and Nutriomics. This collaboration is set to create a major research force on one of the world's largest agricultural crops and is poised to become the Great Leap Forward in western and eastern cross cultivation.