[Smart Farmers] The power of seeds: Uncovering the "treasure genes" of the National Tea Germplasm Resource Garden

A tiny seed contains huge potential. An excellent plant variety can bring infinite value. Recently, we visited the National Tea Germplasm Resource Garden to explore the "treasure genes" hidden in tea resources.

National Tea Germplasm Resource Garden

The National Tea Germplasm Resource Garden is located in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, and houses nearly 3,000 tea germplasm resources from all over the world. These precious resources are preserved in this land in a living form. For some large-leaf tea resources from Yunnan and overseas, they are protected in greenhouses in order to survive the winter.

According to Jin Jiqiang, associate researcher at the Tea Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, the germplasm resource garden is not just a simple storage library, it also has many responsibilities, including but not limited to safe storage of resources, resource identification and evaluation, and the most critical task - discovering and excavating some excellent materials from these resources for breeding. With these excellent basic materials, our breeding process will be able to have more excellent genes, thereby cultivating more and better plant varieties.

National Tea Germplasm Resource Garden

In the National Tea Germplasm Resource Garden, we saw the famous mother tree of Longjing 43. It is understood that in the early days of the establishment of the Tea Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, in order to improve the quality and productivity of Longjing tea, the older generation of tea experts selected Longjing 43 from the Longjing tea tree group in the Yunqi Mountain area of ​​Hangzhou, and the mother tree was subsequently transplanted here.

Longjing 43 mother tree

It is reported that Longjing 43 is an excellent tea tree selected and bred on a large scale by the Tea Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences in 1960. After cultivation, it eventually evolved into a tea tree variety with excellent overall performance. Its outstanding characteristics are early germination, high yield and excellent quality. It is a tea tree variety with very superior comprehensive traits. In 1978, it won the National Science Conference Award and was recognized as a national variety in 1987. Today, it is one of the most widely planted tea tree varieties in my country and is deeply loved by tea farmers.

However, the optimization of tea varieties never stops. With the improvement of social living standards, consumers' requirements for tea varieties are also changing. "In the past, we pursued high-yield and high-quality varieties such as Longjing 43; in the future, we will seek more diverse varieties, such as those with higher functional ingredients and more suitable for poor soils," said Jin Jiqiang.

Tea Tree Breeding Garden of Tea Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences

The existing tea varieties do not have these excellent genes. Therefore, scientists need to screen and identify materials with these excellent genes from a large number of wild resources and local varieties, and genetically improve them with traditional varieties in order to cultivate tea varieties with higher fertilizer efficiency, higher functional ingredients, or special uses (such as making tea powder).

Only by fully tapping the potential of tea germplasm resources can we cultivate more and better tea varieties that meet the needs of social industries in the future.

Produced by: Popular Science in China to Benefit Farmers

Scientific review: Jin Jiqiang (Associate Researcher, Tea Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences)

Text editor: Song Yajuan, Xiao Chunfang, Wu Yuetong

Acknowledgement: Tea Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences