The 15^th International Rapeseed Congress (IRC) was held at the Berlin International Conference Center in Germany, from June 16 to 19, 2019. About 842 representatives, including eminent professors, scientists and technical experts along with many postgraduate students across 43 countries attended the congress.

Prof. Zhou Weijun was invited to present research on “Innovations of elite quality and coloured flower rapeseed varieties via composite interspecific hybridization and molecular breeding”, which highlighted the new varieties of elite quality, high-yield and disease-resistant rapeseed developed by Zhejiang University, such as Zheda 622 and Zheda 630, among which Zheda 630 with oil content (up to 49.21%) ranks first in China's conventional rapeseed varieties which suggest that cultivation of high oil producing rapeseed will bring more net profit to the farmers. Prof. Zhou also introduces several colored Brassica napus called as “Zheda Colourful Rapeseeds”, with white, yellow-green, yellowish orange, orange, pink, orange red and purple petal colours, which are independently selected. Some of the rapeseeds also have purple stem and leaves along with various petal colours, which are considered attractive for countryside tourism promotion and honey production.

At the same time, Prof. Zhou’s three PhD candidate students, including Huang Qian, Zhang Kangni, and Theodore M. Mwamba, respectively, presented their research at IRC Berlin (as poster), with the title of Characterisation of rapeseed drought tolerance and association mapping by transcriptomics, Association mapping of agronomic traits in an allohexaploid Brassica doubled haploid population using QTL and GWAS, and Insights into Brassica napus responses to cadmium stress through metabolomic profiling of two genotypes differing in metal tolerance and accumulation.

     From June 20 to 24, after the IRC Berlin meeting, Prof. Zhou’s group also visited the Justus Liebig University (Giessen, Germany) and discussed the progress on the Joint Sino-German cooperation project “Towards new Brassica crops: genetic improvement of Brassica hexaploids. During their stay at JustusLiebigUniversity, several sessions were organized to share progress and discuss various critical aspects of the project among the professors of the cooperative team of JustusLiebigUniversity. The relevant professors from HuazhongAgriculturalUniversity (China) were also joined discussion and were briefed about progress in the laboratory and on the site. In addition, Prof. Zhou had a good interaction with the academicians, professors and experts from various organizations, including Justus Liebig University, University of Western Australia, Svalof Weibull AB (SW Seed, Sweden), and exchanged many useful ideas among each others on rapeseed as well as other common scientific interests.