Global Agriculture is facing growing challenges including limitation in freshwater resources, topsoil depletion, as well as extreme temperatures brought upon by climate change. Sustainable agriculture is now among the top national priorities of developing countries, to bolster food security, economy, and environmental sustainability.

Among all crops, soybean is the third most important cash crop in the international trade market. It is the No. 1source of vegetable protein, the leading source of edible oils as well as a source of biodiesel. In addition, its high symbiotic nitrogen fixing capacity is environmentally important as its cultivation can naturally replenish soil nutrients. Despite all its benefits, soybean's great potential in promoting sustainable agriculture is still undervalued and awaiting to be unveiled.

Prof. Lam Hon-Ming, Director of the Partner State Key Laboratory of Agrobiotechnology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (PSKLA), has been working on the identification of stress tolerance genes in soybean for almost 20 years. In 2010, Prof. Lam published a cover article in the renowned scientific journal Nature Genetics, reporting the decoding of 31 wild and cultivated soybean genomes that revealed a much higher biodiversity in wild soybeans. In 2014, his team has successfully identified and cloned a major salt tolerance gene from wild soybeans. This finding was published in Nature Communications, a multi-disciplinary scientific journal ranked just after Nature and Science. This is a milestone in the mass production of high quality salt tolerant soybeans, a stage reached which will eventually benefit agriculture worldwide.

Prof. Lam has also been working with soybean breeders in China to produce salinity and drought tolerant soybeans that can be grown on saline and/ or arid lands, via non-GM methods. In 2016, two new stress tolerant soybean cultivars gained provincial approval in China, and were cultivated in arid regions to restore arable land and help the local farmers. In the same year, he jointly published a perspective article to Nature Plants, together with other members of the World University Network (WUN).

Using the WUN platform, Prof. Lam organized an international legume symposium in 2017, hosting more than a hundred legume scientists from the six Continents, establishing extensive collaboration networks for academic exchange and collaboration projects.

In 2017, Prof. Lam leading a team of plant and agricultural researchers, has been awarded funding in excess of HKD81 million over 8 years from the Area of Excellence (AoE) Scheme under the Research Grants Council (RGC), with their vision to develop  new  plant  and  agricultural technology to strike for a better balance between food security and agricultural sustainability.