氮是植物生长发育必需一种大量营养元素。由于氮对作物生产力的巨大影响，农业生产中过量使用氮肥愈来愈普遍，但粮食产量却没有按氮肥的投入成比例的增长。显然，氮肥施用量过度超过了植物能吸收利用的能力，造成严重的土壤面源和水体污染，同时，化肥的过量施用也增加了农民种粮的生产成本。当今，我们面临着巨大挑战，一方面我们需要继续提高粮食的产量来满足不断增长的人口，另一方面，我们要兼顾环境，减少化肥的施用对环境的污染。因此，提高氮肥利用率，增加作物产量，同时减少浪费和污染已成为现代农业急需解决的问题，一种有效的解决方法就是培养出氮营养高效利用的高产作物新品种，这个方法的成败取决于我们是否把握氮高效利用基因。本课题拟在拟南芥中证明NLP7转录因子是一个很好的提高植物氮利用率的优良候选基因的工作基础上，进一步深度解析水稻NLP基因的功能，并将其应用到农作物中，为培育氮高效利用的高产作物新品种创制新种质。

Nitrogen (N) is an essential macronutrient required for plant development and growth. Due to its great impact on crop productivity, nitrogen fertilizer overuse has been wide spread in agriculture. Ironically, grain yield has not been increased accordingly with the nitrogen fertilizer over input. Clearly, the N fertilizer over input exceeds the capability of absorption and utilization by plants and meanwhile generates tremendous problems of soil and water pollution. In addition, fertilizer overuse increases farmers production cost. Today, our agriculture must take the great challenge to feed our increasing population and protect our environment from fertilizer overuse. Therefore, we must significantly improve crop nitrogen use efficiency (NUE) and increase yield with less and unnecessary nitrogen over input. To reach this goal, the best and smartest way is to develop crop varieties with high NUE and high yield, which largely depend on the availability of high NUE candidate genes. Based on our work on Arabidopsis NLP gene, capable of increase NUE and biomass, we propose to extend the NLP-related research to rice and generate high NUE rice germplasm for breeding high NUE and high yield crops.