Abstract
This study aims to quantify nitrogen (N) effect on occurrence of perfect rice kernel (PRK) and imperfect grains which includes white-belly rice kernel (WBRK), white-core rice kernel (WCRK), green rice kernel (GRK), opaque rice kernel (ORK), and other imperfect grains (OTHERS). Two-year field experiments involving six japonica rice cultivars and seven N treatments were performed. The structural differences between white-belly and white-core tissues were compared using scanning electron microscope. Averaged over cultivars, grain yield increased progressively with N rate. PRK increased with N rate in 2008, but decreased with increased N rate in 2009. WBRK and WCRK decreased as N rate increased for both years. High N input resulted in higher occurrence of GRK and OTHERS for both years. Most starch granules in white-belly tissues are intact and surrounded by globular protein bodies, with many air spaces between them; while in white-core tissues, starch granules are easily broken into many single granules and no protein bodies are visible. Our results suggest that N has suppressing influence on chalky grains but favorable effect on other imperfect grains, and indicate different mechanism between WBRK and WCRK.
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Acknowledgements
The authors wish to express their sincere thanks to Dr. Takayuki Umemoto, National Institute of Crop Science, Japan, for his valuable suggestions for improvement of this manuscript, and to Duanfei Wang, Chunmiao Geng, Pengfu Hou, and Yang Liu, Nanjing Agricultural University for their kind assistance in field experiments. This research was supported by grants from Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (BK2008104), Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University (NCET-10-0472), the Excellent Young Teachers Program of Ministry of Education of China (200803071017), the Priority Academic Program Development of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions, and National Natural Science Foundation of China (30971733).
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Responsible Editor: Martin Weih.
J. Qiao and Z. Liu contributed equally to this work.
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Qiao, J., Liu, Z., Deng, S. et al. Occurrence of perfect and imperfect grains of six japonica rice cultivars as affected by nitrogen fertilization. Plant Soil 349, 191–202 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11104-011-0861-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11104-011-0861-4