Current Status and Future Prospect of Sericultural Science and Technology in the World

Silk is praised "Queen of Fiber", which wrote a glorious page in the history of human adornment culture. Thanks to the development of science and technology, silk production has been increased dramatically during last half century. Nowadays, as "Healthy Fiber" silk lets all the globe to be forming the "Silk Boom" Like in other scientific fields, a great deal of progress has been made in sericultural science and technology, which also accelerated the development of multipurpose utilization of sercultural recourses. The main tendency of the sericulture development is raising the quality of cocoon, and at the same time, increasing the output per unit mulberry area and labor production efficiency. The chief measure of raising the cocoon quality is breeding and selecting the new mulberry and silkworm varieties, preventing and curing the diseases and pests and improving the environment of mounting, and the symble for increasing the labor productivity is carrying out the technological system of saving labor and operation ease, and enlarging the production scale. As a natural protein fiber, silk will be still a favorite with human in the next century, because its structure and properties can not be replaced by other any fiber. The 21st century is the biological time, and measures of developing sericulture will use the achievement on the field of molecular biology and biotechnology to carry out the molecular breeding, development regulating, silkworm rearing industrializing, exploiting the new silk and its new usage, utilizing the sericultural resources, and producing the special protein from silkworm as a host of expressing exogenous genes so that make the sericulture to contribute more what it can do for the human being.