Prof. ZHOU Xueping, DG of IPP-CAAS, was recently granted the Fellow status of the American Society of Plant Pathology (APS Fel-low). The award ceremony was held at 2018 Interna-tional Plant Pathology Con-gress in Boston, USA on Ju-ly 30th, 2018. A total of 11 scientists around the world received this award this year. Prof. PENG Youliang, from China Agricultural University was one of them, too. This was the first time that scholars from mainland China received this award. The society grants this honor to a cur-rent APS member in recognition of distinguished contributions to plant pathology.
Prof. ZHOU completed his PhD degree in 1992 at Nanjing Agricultural University. Then, he started as a postdoctoral fellow at Zhejiang Agricultural University. He was promoted to a full professor in 1997 and held positions as Vice Dean and Dean of the College of Agriculture and Biotechnology at Zhejiang University. Since 2013, he has been the DG of IPP-CAAS, and the Director of the State Key Laboratory for Biology of Plant Diseases and Insect Pests. He also holds part-time positions including the Executive Committee Member of the International Association for the Plant Protection Sciences (IAPPS), Councilor for the International Society for Plant Pathology (ISPP), Member of International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV), Member of the Ninth Committee of Science and Technology of the Ministry of Agri-culture, and editorial board members for international journals such as Annual Review of Phytopathology,Journal of General Virology,Virology, etc.
Prof. ZHOU has made significant contributions for detection of plant viruses and understand-ing of virus pathogenesis. In applied research, he raised monoclonal antibodies against more than 40 plant viruses and used them to design sensitive serological methods for virus detec-tion in crops and transmission vectors, and to implement disease control measures. For exam-ple, he provided leadership that reduced rice stripe virus (RSV) disease to low levels by using virus detection and control methods.His extensive fundamental research has focused on iden-tification and elucidation of molecular functions of geminiviruses and their associated DNA satellites. He has identified 41 geminiviruses, 31 of which are distinct species, and demonstrat-ed that 17 geminiviruses are associated with DNA satellite. Prof. ZHOU has analyzed func-tions of DNA satellite encoded protein against host gene silencing. These findings show that the DNA satellite interacts with a host methyltransferase cofactor to suppress methylation ac-tivities that interfere with epigenetic modifications of the viral genome. His research group has also characterized the molecular function of geminivirus-associated DNA satellites and adapted them as virus-induced gene silencing vectors.
Prof. ZHOU has published more than 200 papers in numerous peer-reviewed journals, in-cluding Genes and Development, Annual Review of Phytopathology, Plant Cell, PLoS Patho-gens, Plant Journal, Plant Physiology, and Journal of Virology. The honors and awards that Prof. ZHOU has obtained include “The National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars” sponsored by NSFC (2001), “National candidates of Millions of Talent Projects” sponsored by Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security of the People's Republic of China and “National Excellent Postdoctoral Fellow (2005)” then he was selected as a Distin-guished Professor of Changjiang Scholars. In 2012, he was awarded the “National Outstand-ing Talent in Agricultural Research” and the honorary title of “National Excellent Science and Technology Worker (2014)”. In 2017, Prof. ZHOU won the Prize for Scientific and Tech-nological Progress for Agronomy from the Ho Leung Ho Lee Foundation.