The Discipline of Plant Nutrition is the secondary discipline withright to award master degrees, which has been approved by the academic degree committee of the State Council since 2006. It consists of two teaching and research branches of plant nutrition and plant physiology. The discipline includes three research directions: the plant nutrition physiology and molecular biology, the nutrient resource management and new fertilizer, and the plant nutrition of landscape, and the medicinal plants and flower.

The discipline has 5 master advisors and 2 doctoral advisors. In recent years, 6 NSFC projects, 5 key national projects, and more than 20 Ministerial, Provincial, and Municipal projects were funded to the research groups of this discipline. More than 20 awards were obtained from national, provincial and municipal levels. To date, more than 60 students with the Ph.D. or master degrees have graduated from the plant nutrition discipline.

The undergraduate courses offered by this discipline for the students from forestry, landscape, life sciences, biological science and biotechnology specialty include plant physiology, plant nutrition, etc. Graduate courses include the advanced plant physiology, the principles and advances of plant nutrition, the soil chemistry of plant nutrition, and the genetics and molecular biology of plant nutrition. The discipline considers to exploit new varieties of plants and resource saving technology as the significant requirements, and develop the significant innovative research on the whole-plant and cellular level response, the efficient utilization of plant water and nutrient, and thephysiological and molecular genetic mechanism for the expression of important agronomic characters in the yield and quality of agricultural products.