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Journal of Tea Science ›› 2020, Vol. 40 ›› Issue (5): 576-587.doi: 10.13305/j.cnki.jts.2020.05.002

• Research Paper • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Early Identification of Nitrogen Absorption Efficiency in Tea Plants

SU Jingjing1,2, RUAN Li1, WANG Liyuan1, WEI Kang1, WU Liyun1, BAI Peixian1,2, CHENG Hao1,*   

  1. 1. Tea Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, National Center for Tea Improvement, Key Laboratory of Tea Biology and Resource Utilization, Ministry of Agriculture, Hangzhou 310008, China;
    2. Graduate School of Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Beijing 100081, China
  • Received:2020-01-13 Revised:2020-03-17 Online:2020-10-15 Published:2020-10-10

Abstract: Nitrogen is one of the most important elements for tea plants, and it has been over supplied in tea gardens, which not only results in the waste of resources, but also causes a series of environmental problems. Therefore, to breed tea cultivars with high nitrogen efficiency, it is necessary to establish an early detection of nitrogen usage rates which could be developed for screening the strains of tea plants. This study analyzed the absorption and utilization of ammonia nitrogen and nitrate nitrogen in two tea cultivars Longjing 43 (LJ43) and Zhongcha 108 (ZC108) under different nitrogen levels. The 15N isotope labeling technology was applied to verify the feasibility and practicability of non-invasive micro-test technology (NMT) and real-time fluorescence quantitative (qRT-PCR) technology in early identification of nitrogen absorption and utilization abilities of tea lines. The purpose of this study was to establish an indoor early identification technology of nitrogen absorption efficiency for tea plants. The results show that the accuracy, stability and repeatability of 15N were 85.16%, 89.51% and 99.26% respectively. While the accuracy, stability and repeatability of NMT were 91.35%, 95.22% and 96.76% respectively. The two methods showed that tea plants had obvious ammonium preference. Moreover, the expressions of nitrate transporter genes CsNRT3.2 and CsNRT2.4 were up-regulated by nitrogen in both cultivars. Compared with ZC108, the expressions of CsNRT2.4 and CsNRT3.2 in LJ43 were higher, indicating that the response of LJ43 to external nitrogen applications was higher than that of ZC108. Finally, it was preliminarily summarized that the NMT technology could measure the instantaneous absorption rate of tea plants in a short time with little loss of experimental materials. It might also be applied for the early detection of the instantaneous nitrogen absorption rates of tea plants. Meanwhile, the results also show that the expressions of CsNRT2.4 and CsNRT3.2 could partly reflect the nitrogen absorption ability of tea plants. This study provided a basis to develop techniques in early identification of high nitrogen-efficient cultivars in tea plants.

Key words: tea plants, nitrogen uptake rate, non-invasive micro-test technology (NMT), 15N isotope-labeled, qRT-PCR

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