Shen Shanjiong

Shen Shanjiong (; 13 April 1917 – 26 March 2021) was a Chinese microbiologist and geneticist. He was an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Biography Shen was born into a family of farming background in Wujiang County, Jiangsu, on 13 April 1917. He attended Tailaiqiao School and Tongli School . After graduating from Wujiang Middle School , he was accepted to Suzhou Agricultural School. He returned to China after the outbreak of the Korean War.

Contributions Shen’s college life was largely influenced by World War II. In 1937, he was admitted to University of Nanking. However, the war between Chinese and Japanese armies at Nanjing resulted in closures and relocations of many departments of University of Nanking, including the school of agriculture in which Shen was studying. Under the influence of the intensifying warfare, Shen was forced to exile to Kunming, Yunnan Province, in 1938. There he got a chance to enroll in the National Southwestern Associated University and met his first mentor, Professor Zhang Jing-ax, who recommended him to study abroad at the California Institute of Technology. During his three years at Caltech, Shen and his mentor, Professor Horowitz, mainly did research on tyrosinase formation, and found that tyrosinase production by wild type Neurospora was inhibited by humidity and sulfide containing substances. In his later years, Shen recalled that while Southwestern Associated University shaped him into a scientist, Caltech allowed him to learn about the frontiers of biological research.

In the early 1950s, there were only three countries around the world that had mature technologies to produce Chlortetracycline: the United States, the United Kingdom, and Italy. After attending a national antibiotics symposium in 1952, Shen, together with his research team, decided to start their research on synthesis of Chlortetracycline. In 1957, he found and solved the inhibition effect of iron ions on Chlortetracycline production. Two years later, he found that the aromatic ring of Chlortetracycline came from sedoheptulose-1,7-diphosphate. He also found that phosphate terminates the pentose cycle, thus inhibiting the synthesis of sedoheptulose-1,7-diphosphate. Based on his research outcomes, the manufacturers limited the concentration of phosphate in the fermentation media, thus largely enhanced the efficiency of large-scale Chlortetracycline production in China, making China the fourth country in the world to produce aureomycin.

Other major research focuses of Shen included genetics of bacterial nitrogen fixation. Shen and his colleagues reexamined the earlier finding of Dixon and Kennedy that there was a 9000bp silence region between the two clusters of nine nitrogen-fixation (nif) genes of K. pnuemoniae in the neighborhood of the his operon. Shen examined 7 different nif genes and proved that they were all mapped in a single cluster in the his region, without the presence of a silence region. He also found that nif mutant C-7 was an example of a class of nif genes that exerted a regulatory effect on other nif genes, besides specifying their own product.

Honours and awards 1956 State Natural Science Award (First Class) 1979 State Natural Science Award (First Class) 1981 State Natural Science Award (First Class) 1997 Tan Kah Kee Award for Life Sciences 1999 Science and Technology Progress Award of the Ho Leung Ho Lee Foundation 1980 Member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS)