Chuanying Fang received his Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Huazhong Agricultural University. Then, he accepted the offer as a high-level talent of Hainan University in July 2017. Fang’s research interests lie in exploring and utilizing metabolic diversity in plants. When he was a Ph.D. student, he and his colleagues identified that the MeOH-jasmonate cascade and its epigenetic regulation are crucial for controlling leaf senescence process in rice. In plants, age-associated senescence is most dramatically observed in the leaves of annual plants and this process is related to yield in some crops including rice. Leaf senescence in rice is affected by external and internal signals, such as jasmonates. Fang’s work reported an investigation on the genetic basis of natural variation of jasmonates. The metabolic profiling and the following metabolite-based genome-wide association study (mGWAS) identified two major quantitative genes (OsPME1 and OsTSD2) that underpin the variation of jasmonates and their roles in methanol production. Subsequent investigation disclosed that the MeOH-jasmonate cascade determined leaf senescence. Fang and his colleagues further provided evidence that OsSRT1, one of the two Sir2 homologous in rice, negatively regulates leaf senescence through repressing the expression of the biosynthetic genes of this metabolic cascade by histone H3K9 deacetylation, and possibly by associating directly with OsPME1 (Fang et al., 2016).