During April 8-10, Prof. Marc van Montagu, president of the European Federation of Biotechnology (EFB), and Prof. Lars Bolund of University of Aarhus, Denmark paid a visit to XTBG in the company of Prof. Yang Huanming, director of Beijing Genomics Institute, CAS.

  During their stay in the Garden, the three professors delivered lectures separately to the XTBG staff and students. They showed much interest in the science research and species preservation of XTBG and hoped to carry out cooperation in different fields with the Garden.

  Marc van Montagu is an Emeritus Professor at Ghent University, Belgium, and president of the Federation of Biotechnology (EFB). He is a worldwide renowned pioneer in molecular biology. Together with his colleague that late Prof. Jeff Schell, he discovered the gene transfer mechanism between Agrobacterium tumefaciens and plants and constructed the first chimerical plant gene, which resulted in the development of methods to alter Agrobacterium into an efficient delivery system for plant gene engineering.