Purple-fleshed sweet potatoes are extremely popular among the public due to rich in anthocyanins in their storage roots, which serves as the best nutritional healthy food and is the objective of sweet potato breeders. The project entitled "Breeding and Utilization of High-quality Purple-fleshed Sweet Potato Variety Taizhong-11" , jointly applied by the Tai’an Academy of Agricultural Sciences and SCCB has won the 2nd prize of 2019 "Tai’an Science and Technology Progress Award" (Certificate No: JB2019-2-19-5). Associate Prof. Wang Hongxia and Prof. Zhang Peng ranked the second and fifth awardee of this award, respectively.

The project was aimed to overcome major limitations in sweet potato production, including availability of few purple sweet potatoes varieties, mismatch between yield and quality, andlack of productsfor the market demand. A new purple-fleshed sweet potato variety “Taizhong-11” (No: Lu Nongshen 2015041) possessing high yield and quality was developed by the open pollination of Yan-176 cultivar and progeny screening. The total planted area under this cultivar reached 1.56 million acres, which bring the economic benefit of about 526 million Yuan, hence, playing a significant role in socio-economic benefits.