The potential to be an effective means to control this insect pest, which attacks cruciferous crop vegetables, including broccoli, cabbage, and turnips. Enhanced photosynthetic performance is observed during rewatering periods, which allows for a complete recovery of paper mulberries from successive intermittent drought stresses. The paper mulberry can effectively reduce the osmotic stress of hypersaline soil by absorbing and accumulating NaCl. In addition, the contents of carbohydrates, amino acids and phytohormones in the leaves of paper mulberry are affected by traffic pollution, suggesting that paper mulberries can physiologically regulate their metabolism to adapt to or resist traffic stress. As a landscape plant, the paper mulberry has been grown broadly in polluted areas due to its relatively high phytoremediation capacity to clean up strontium and other toxic metals from contaminated soils. The surface properties of the leaf powder of paper mulberry is suitable for the metal adsorption process, which makes it as an ideal adsorbent to remove heavy metal ions from aqueous solutions. In order to facilitate the collection and evaluation of germplasm resources, a male-specific AFLP marker has been developed and can be used for sex identification in paper mulberry. Genetic diversity revealed by SRAP markers and cluster analysis have shown that there is a relationship between the genetic variation and geographical distribution. These results provide a reference for mapping of QTL regions and breeding of paper mulberry. However, our knowledge about the genetic basis of the beneficial traits show by the paper mulberry is still lagging behind advances in understanding its physiology and biochemistry. The biosynthesis pathways of flavonols and other medical components are not fully elucidated. The molecular mechanism underlying its strong adaptability and tolerance to biotic or abiotic stress remains poorly understood, which presents a challenge to the further exploitation of the paper mulberry for human needs. This is mostly caused by the fact that few genetic studies have been done on this species, due to its long lifecycle. In recent years, the development of Next Generation Sequencing has provided a means by which we can rapidly generate significant amounts of genetic data. The Illumina platform is able to produce millions of reads in one run and provide reads from 100 to 250 bp in length with lower cost. This technology is suitable for de novo sequencing, re-sequencing, transcriptomics and metagenomic sequencing. In 2011, the Trinity program for transcriptome reconstruction has been developed to assemble a transcriptome from NGS data when no reference genome is available. De novo assembly of RNA-seq data enables researchers to study the transcriptome without a genome as reference, which has been successfully applied in screening and identification of secondary metabolite biosynthesis.