HAIKOU, July 3. /TASS/. Research teams working in the High-Tech Zone in Yazhou Bay in Sanya use the capabilities of the free trade port in China’s southernmost province to develop research in crop breeding and exploration of deep-sea resources, Sanya Ribao reported.

According to the newspaper, thanks to the construction of the free trade port, the Yazhou research cluster has transformed into a key Chinese hub for crop breeding and maritime research. National research platforms, the country’s leading universities, and research institutes are active here.

Xia Zhiqiang, deputy dean of the Sanya South Breeding Research Institute at Hainan University, noted that the region offers unique advantages for crop breeding. According to him, more than 70% of new agricultural crop varieties in China undergo accelerated breeding exactly in Hainan. His research team has developed a large language model of OryzaG3, a rice genome designed for the application of artificial intelligence (AI) technology in crop breeding. The model integrates approximately 700 million parameters and, as the developers say, is comparable in efficiency to foreign analogues with a significantly larger number of parameters, while data processing speed has increased fourfold. According to the scientist, since Hainan embraced a free trade port experiment, opportunities for international cooperation, including in the sphere of ​​cross-border biological data exchange, have expanded, and simplified import procedures for scientific equipment and materials have been introduced.