In the morning of August 24, 2012, unveiling ceremony of "Demonstration Base for Molecular Breeding and New Variety of Sweet Potato" was held in the Culai Town Hall of Daiyue District, Taian City. Laigeng Li, SIPPE Deputy Director, and Enhu Xu, Vice Mayor of Taian city, attended the unveiling ceremony and visited the base. On behalf of SCCB, Prof. Peng Zhang and Dr. Jun Yang participated in the important event.

The base is a research and demonstration one jointly built by SIPPE, Taian Academy of Agricultural Sciences (TAAS) and Taian Daiyue District for promoting multiple collaborations on sweetpotato breeding and cultivar popularization. Long-term cooperation mechanism has been well developed between SIPPE and TAAS over the last 7 years on project collaboration, institutional cooperation, exchanges of personnel and information as well as base construction. The base has been used for evaluating transgenic sweetpotato having improved starch quality, breeding new elite sweetpotato varieties Taizhong 6 and Taizhong 9. The joint project "Novel variety breeding for high-yielding and starch-type sweetpotato and starch quality improvement technology", which is supported by Shandong Science and Technology Development Program, won the first class of Science and Technology Progress Award of Taian in 2012.

At the same time, the unveiling ceremony of "Taian Engineering Research Center of sweetpotato" was also held. It will enhance the research capacity and strengthen the competitiveness of TAAS on sweetpotato research and breeding, which will greatly promote sweetpotato industrialization.