In a landmark breakthrough for tropical fruit breeding, the world’s first lychee tree successfully hybridized with longan as the pollen parent has borne fruit for the first time. The achievement, announced by China’s Xinhua News Agency, took place at the National Lychee Germplasm Resource Nursery in Tianhe District, Guangzhou, marking a milestone in overcoming the natural reproductive barriers between these two beloved fruits.
A Decade of Cross-Breeding Pays Off
Lychee (Litchi chinensis) and longan (Dimocarpus longan) both belong to the Sapindaceae family but are classified under different genera, making natural cross-pollination extremely difficult due to reproductive incompatibility. In 2015, researchers from the Guangdong Academy of Agricultural Sciences embarked on an ambitious intergeneric crossing experiment, using the late-maturing lychee variety “Huaizhi” as the female parent and the “Shixia” longan variety as the male parent.
After years of painstaking effort, the first fruits matured this May. Remarkably, the offspring of two late-maturing parents exhibited early-maturing characteristics—a surprising and valuable trait. The fruit boasts a crisp, refreshingly sweet flesh with a rich aroma, offering a significant quality advantage over existing early-maturing lychee varieties such as “Sanyuehong” (March Red), which tend to be more acidic and lower in sugar content. The new variety is provisionally named “Huaishi” —combining the first characters of its maternal parent “Huaizhi” and paternal parent “Shixia.”
Breaking the Reproductive Barrier
This success follows a previous milestone achieved by South China Agricultural University in 2022, when researchers developed “Cuimi” (Crisp Honey)—the world’s first hybrid using longan as the female parent and lychee as the male parent.
With the new “Huaishi” variety succeeding in the opposite direction—lychee as the female parent and longan as the male—scientists have now achieved bidirectional breakthroughs in breaking the intergeneric reproductive isolation between lychee and longan. This opens up entirely new possibilities for tropical fruit breeding programs, allowing breeders to combine desirable traits from both species in ways previously thought impossible.
Alleviating Early-Season Quality Gaps
One of the most promising aspects of “Huaishi” is its potential to address a long-standing challenge in the lychee industry: the scarcity of high-quality early-maturing varieties. Early-season lychees currently available on the market often suffer from poor flavor profiles, with higher acidity and lower sweetness. “Huaishi” offers superior eating quality at an earlier harvest window, which could significantly enhance the commercial value of early-season production and extend the availability of premium lychees for consumers.
Market Outlook: Five to Six Years Away
Currently, “Huaishi” is undergoing comparative variety trials to evaluate its performance, stability, and adaptability across different growing conditions. The research team expects that it will take approximately five to six years before the new variety is officially released to the market and made available to farmers and consumers.
Significance for Global Fruit Breeding
This breakthrough carries implications far beyond China’s borders. Lychee and longan are cultivated throughout Southeast Asia, Australia, South Africa, South America, and parts of the United States. The successful intergeneric hybridization between these two economically important fruits demonstrates the potential for broadened genetic diversity and could inspire similar cross-breeding programs worldwide.
The “Huaishi” variety, with its early maturity and high-quality flavor profile, may eventually help growers capture premium early-market prices while providing consumers with a more satisfying eating experience during the early part of the lychee season.
