Abstract:

Seven bread wheat cultivars with high gluten content were used to study the effects of nitrogen fertilizer treatment on wheat quality and grain yield, and the difference within cultivars by the split plot design for two factors. The experiment was carried out on the Experimental Farm of the Institute of Crop Sciences, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences. The results showed that the grain yield was increased with the nitrogen application from 0 to 300 kg/ha and significantly different among treatments. However, the yield was increased only 3.1% when the nitrogen was applied from 225 kg/ha to 300 kg/ha (Table 1). So about 225 kg/ha of nitrogen application in practice is suggested. Contents of gliadin and glutenin (storage protein) were affected more than these of albumin and globulin (soluble protein), the contents of storage protein and gross protein were remarkably increased, and therefore processing quality was improved, by nitrogen treatments, the main characteristics of processing quality were improved with increasing the applied nitrogen within a certain range. Many important quality characteristics of baking bread including wet gluten, sedimentation, stable time, extension area, extensibility and so on were significantly improved for nitrogen treatments (Table 5). However, there were some differences among cultivars. Although some indices were different greatly, the bread volume and bread score were nearly the same (Table 6).

Key words: Amount of nitrogen application, Strong gluten wheat, Grain yield, Processing quality