This laboratory is supported by CAS under the co-operation between the Institute of Subtropical Agriculture and Hunan province, and is oriented towards the manipulation of agricultural eco-systems crossing molecular, processes, systems to landscape, and regional scales, including fields monitoring, soil, water, plant and animal analyses and tests, with extension to field demonstrations. The total area of the headquarter laboratory is approximately over 3500 m2. It is divided into four functional units, with facilities capable for following researches:
RS-GIS and land planning: equipped with hyper-spectrograph , scanner-plotter-digitizer , database management system software (SQL Sever2000 and ACCESS), remote sense image-processing soft wares (ARCGIS and ERDAS, LENOVO service and DELL service).
Physical and chemical analyses: equipped with instruments for analyzing soil, water and plant tissues; including analyses of soil physical and chemical properties, nutrients (macro and micro) and heavy metals; including inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer (ICP-MASS), atomic absorption spectrometer (AAS), phase-high pressure liquid chromatography (HPLC), and so on.
Animal analyses: equipped with instruments for analyzing animal physiological and nutrition parameters; including analyses of chemical composition of feedstuff, biochemical variables of blood, and meat quality indexes; including amino acid automatic analyzer, GC and biochemical characters.
Molecular analyses: equipped with Affymetrix gene chip system, real time polymerase chain reaction (PCR) apparatus, particle bombardment apparatus, gel imaging system, super high speed centrifuge, super low temperature refrigerator, super clean work station, plant growth chamber, microscope, which can satisfy the demands for gene clone, gene transformation, molecular marker development, maker assistant selection, plant tissue culture and other experiments of molecular biology, genetics, plant chemistry and physiology.