Genetic Approaches to Develop Salt Tolerant Germplasm

Abstract

Forty percent of the world's food is produced under irrigation, and this is directly threatened by over-exploitation and changes in the global environment. One way to address this threat is to develop systems for increasing our ability to use lower quality water, in particular saline water. Low cost partial desalination of brackish water, use of saline water for cooling and increases in the salinity tolerance of crops can all contribute to the development of this new agricultural system. In this talk, the focus will be on the use of forward genetic approaches for discovery of genes related to salinity tolerance in barley and tomatoes. Rather than studying salinity tolerance as a trait in itself, we dissect salinity tolerance into a series of components that are hypothesised to contribute to overall salinity tolerance (following the paradigm of Munns & Tester, 2008).