A ceremony to unveil the nameplate and launch the construction of the Dongting Laboratory, a provincial-level key laboratory, was held at Yueyang College on October 15, 2023. 

 
As an important part of the Yuelu Mountain Industrial Innovation Center, it is the only laboratory jointly constructed by the provincial and municipal governments and settled in a municipal region. A headquarter laboratory building and a provincial-level food industry sci-tech innovation park will be built in the first phase, which will be put into operation in late July of 2024 and late 2025 respectively.

In 2022, Hunan started construction of a provincial-level laboratory system led by Yuelu Mountain Laboratory, Yuelu Mountain Industrial Innovation Center, Xiangjiang Laboratory, and Furong Laboratory. These laboratories and center will be built into innovative platforms of advanced seed industry, industrial generic technology, computing power support, and precision medicine, respectively.

The Dongting Laboratory will focus on food resource protection, processing, and utilization; research on basic theories and cutting-edge technologies; making breakthroughs in key and core technologies; and, entire industrial chain quality and security control. It will organize basic, pioneering, and public-benefit scientific research, and strive to foster endogenous motivating power for sci-tech innovation and drivers for development in food businesses. It aims to build domestically-leading and world-class hubs of food science research, key and core food technology innovation, digitalization-empowering food industry, and high-level food innovation talents, so as to lead the province and the country in innovative development of food industry.

In recent years, Yueyang has firmly taken the development of green food industrial chain as a crucial engine for its construction as a provincial sub-center city. There are 1,650 food processing companies in Yueyang, including 430 large-sized, three listed, and 29 "little giant" firms. In 2022, the total output value of the food processing enterprises over designated size in Yueyang reached 169.67 billion CNY.

This article is from the Hunan Provincial Government www.enghunan.gov.cn.

Translator: Pang Yuehui

Chinese source: hunan.gov.cn