Following his visit last year, Prof. BAI paid a second visit to the laboratory for the Date Palm Genome Project (DPGP), a collaborative project initiated by KACST and Beijing Institute of Genomics (BIG). He listened to the presentation by Prof. YU Jun, vice Director of BIG, on recent progress of the project and talked with BIG researchers. He highly appraised the acheivements of the project and expressed concern on the living and study of Chinese staff.

During the visit, Prof. BAI met with leaders of KACST and signed a memorandum on establishing a Joint Genome Research Center. The Saudi part highly valued the cooperation with BIG researchers on the palm project and also expressed great interests to extend collaborative activities in other research fields of CAS.