Status Of Copper, Lead, And Selenium In Tea Garden Soils From Jing County, Southern Anhui Province And The Uptake, Partitioning In Tea Plants And The Genotypic Difference

Tea has been concerned as a kind of popular healthy drinking and tea plants grow extensively in Southern China. The uptake and the contents of heavy metals has been paid much attention with the risk due to frequent exposure. In this study, Samples of soil and tea plants were collected from some representative tea gardens of Jing County plus a group of tea cultivars from a breeding garden in Xiuning County in southern Anhui respectively, and total contents of copper, lead and selenium both of the soil and the tea organ were determined in an attempt to investigate the partitioning of these heavy metals between soil and tea plants and genotypic effect. The results obtained are as follows:1, Compared to the background value of China soils, the tea garden soils have a medium or near-average level of total copper, lead and selenium in topsoil, which could meet the requirement for non-risk tea or organic tea garden. It seems that the studied tea soils are not polluted with minor contamination of lead from Aeolian dust and are moderately enriched with total selenium, which is correlated to biological accumulation, soil pH, and organic content of these soils.2, Total copper and lead of the tea leaves are well below the State tea security guideline values while total leaf selenium range from 0.10 mg·kg-1 to 0.23 mg·kg-1, being moderately Se-enriched tea. The dominant factor for limited selenium uptake of tea is acid soil condition. The copper partitioning in organs does not obey the root-stem-leaf gradient Very weak partitioning of lead in leaves implicates insignificant translocation of this element within nutritional organs while selenium is shown to be preferably enriched in young nutritional organs, and tea leaves may have an indigenous enrichment tendency of selenium.Genotype difference in uptake and transport of the studied heavy metals varies with element. Root uptake of Copper is shown to be genotypically controlled rather than leafCopper Genotypic difference in Pb and Se uptake and partitioning are obvious and the cultivars with selenium significant enrichment seem to depress the uptake of lead in the leaves, which should be taken into account of high quality tea cultivars breeding.