我组成员在 Annals of Botany 发表文章：Haiyan Ren, Zhuwen Xu, Wenhao Zhang, Lin Jiang, Jianhui Huang, Shiping Chen, Lixin Wang and Xingguo Han, Linking ethylene to nitrogen-dependent leaf longevity of grass species in a temperate steppe. Annals of Botany. 2013.112: 1879–1885. 

　　文章链接:http://aob.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/10/15/aob.mct223.short 

　　Leaf longevity is an important plant functional trait associated with diverse aspects of plant function and life history, contributing to characteristic patterns of material cycling and energy flow in ecosystems (Reich et al., 1992; Craine et al., 1999; Kikuzawa and Ackerly, 1999). A large number of studies have shown that leaf longevity is intimately associated with leaf nitrogen (N) concentration (Reich et al., 1997; Diemer, 1998; Wright et al., 2004; Shipley et al., 2006), such that soil N addition often leadsto shortened leaf longevities (Shaver, 1983; Craine and Reich, 2001; Ren et al., 2011). Such N-dependent leaf longevity is thought to be driven by the trade-off between leaf carbon gain and cost (Chabot and Hicks, 1982; Kikuzawa, 1991; Cordell et al., 2001; Shipley et al., 2006), which causes leaf longevity to decrease with increasing leaf photosynthetic rate and to increase with increasing leaf construction cost. Under this scenario, leaf longevity would decrease with increased N availability, which tends to promote photosynthesis. Despite this understanding, we know little about the biochemical mechanisms underlying N-dependent leaf longevity. This matter is further complicated by the fact that increasing N availability does not always result in reduced leaf longevity (Ryser and Urbas, 2000) and that the opposite pattern, in which leaves senesce faster under N defi- ciency, can also occur (Ono et al., 1996; Hanaoka et al., 2002).