The Discipline of Developmental Biology is a secondary discipline under a primary discipline, Biology Disciple. It consists of Plant and Animal Development teaching and research sections, including a Biological Postdoctoral Research Center and a Floricultural Bioengineering Institute. Currently, this discipline has 6 professors, 10 associate professors, 4 lecturers and 4 other research staffs; all of them own Ph.D. degrees. Faculty members of this discipline have been funded by over 50 research grants from various sources, including Major and General Projects of the National Natural Science Foundation, the State 863 Projects, the State 948 Projects, etc. In the last five years only, the research groups in this discipline attracted over 10 million of funding. They have also published over 200 papers, with 40 of them collected by the SCI, edited or co-edited 22 books, obtained 4 patents, registered 10 new species and received 13 awards at the levels of the nation, province, etc.

This discipline has the following research directions: the developmental biology of plant flower organs, biology of plant reproduction, signal transduction of light induced anthocyanin biosynthesis, development and application of resources for plant stress tolerance species, establishment of plant bioreactor for ginseng resources, bioinformatics, storage and application of mammalian gametes, research of bioreactor based on transgenic animals, proliferation and differentiation of pancreatic stem cell, molecular mechanism of pancreatic development, cancer epigenetics, plant epigenetics, noncoding RNAs, molecular mechanism of embryonic implantation of mammals, high efficient preparation of pregnant mare serum gonadotropin (PMSG) and its application in animal reproduction. The faculty members of this discipline undertake multiple curriculums, including Molecular Biology, Cell Biology, Developmental Biology, Immunology, Epigenetics, Bioinformatics, Experiments of Modern Biology, General Biophysics, etc., for both undergraduate and graduate students. Our courses for Experiments of Molecular Biology and Modern Molecular Biology has been selected as Excellent Courses of our university; Molecular Biology has been ranked as one of Excellent Courses in Heilongjiang Province. Recently, together with the faculty members from other disciplines, we have started “Full-English Teaching” courses for international students, including Epigenetics, Developmental Biology (Animal and Plant), Current Progress of Modern Biology, Bioinformatics, Theories and Applications of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry. These courses are instructed by faculty members who have teaching and research experience in the US and European countries.