Improving crop salt tolerance.
By T. Flowers. Journal of Experimental Botany, 2004
2,206 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Salinity is an ever-present threat to crop yields, especially in countries where irrigation is an essential aid to agriculture. Although the tolerance of saline conditions by plants is variable, crop species are generally intolerant of one-third of the concentration of salts found in seawater. Attempts to improve the salt tolerance of crops through conventional breeding programmes have met with very limited success, due to the complexity of the trait: salt tolerance is complex genetically and physiologically. Tolerance often shows the characteristics of a multigenic trait, with quantitative trait loci (QTLs) associated with tolerance identified in barley, citrus, rice, and tomato and with ion transport under saline conditions in barley, citrus and rice. Physiologically salt tolerance is also complex, with halophytes and less tolerant plants showing a wide range of adaptations. Attempts to enhance tolerance have involved conventional breeding programmes, the use of in vitro selection, pooling physiological traits, interspecific hybridization, using halophytes as alternative crops, the use of marker-aided selection, and the use of transgenic plants. It is surprising that, in spite of the complexity of salt tolerance, there are commonly claims in the literature that the transfer of a single or a few genes can increase the tolerance of plants to saline conditions. Evaluation of such claims reveals that, of the 68 papers produced between 1993 and early 2003, only 19 report quantitative estimates of plant growth. Of these, four papers contain quantitative data on the response of transformants and wild-type of six species without and with salinity applied in an appropriate manner. About half of all the papers report data on experiments conducted under conditions where there is little or no transpiration: such experiments may provide insights into components of tolerance, but are not grounds for claims of enhanced tolerance at the whole plant level. Whether enhanced tolerance, where properly established, is due to the chance alteration of a factor that is limiting in a complex chain or an effect on signalling remains to be elucidated. After ten years of research using transgenic plants to alter salt tolerance, the value of this approach has yet to be established in the field.
Subfields: Plant Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/983f19385ac09d8a5becb64d30cbe8cc63980e51
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Citations in the corpus
- Mechanism of Salinity Tolerance in Plants: Physiological, Biochemical, and Molecular Characterization (2014, background): “Thus salinity is one of the most brutal environmental stresses that hamper crop productivity worldwide [2, 3].”
- Conserved salt tolerance quantitative trait locus (QTL) in wild and cultivated soybeans (2008, background): “Salt tolerance in plants is considered a complex trait (Foolad 2004, Flowers 2004).”
- Physiology and molecular biology of stress tolerance in plants (2006, background): “Despite the fact that salinity tolerance of plants is a multigenic trait, most of the research with transgenic plants showed that transfer of a single or a few genes resulted in an increase in salt tolerance, but which has to be tested at the whole plant level (Flowers, 2004).”
- Chloroplast Genetic Engineering: Recent Advances and Future Perspectives (2005, background): “The badh gene engineered via the nuclear genome resulted in only moderate levels of tolerance to salt stress (Flowers, 2004; Rathinasabapathi et al., 2001).”
- Learning from halophytes: physiological basis and strategies to improve abiotic stress tolerance in crops. (2013, background): “For saline areas, this can be achieved by using alternative crop species, e.g. domestication of halophytic plants suitable for highly saline environments (Epstein et al., 1980; Flowers and Yeo, 1995; Flowers, 2004).”
- Systemic risks of genetically modified crops: the need for new approaches to risk assessment (2011, background): “The application of genetic engineering alone might not lead to the improvement of such complex traits [3-5].”
- Pennisetum glaucum Na+/H+ antiporter confers high level of salinity tolerance in transgenic Brassica juncea (2007, background): “Salinization is a growing problem for agricultural lands and plant productivity (Flowers 2004).”
- Understanding Abiotic Stress Tolerance Mechanisms: Recent Studies on Stress Response in Rice (2007, background): “Rice plants are relatively susceptible to soil salinity, and NaCl is a major salt that causes this problem (Flowers 2004).”
- Recent Updates on Salinity Stress in Rice: From Physiological to Molecular Responses (2011, background): “In the past few years, several reviews on salinity tolerance (Chinnusamy et al., 2005; Flowers, 2004; Mahajan et al., 2008; Mahajan and Tuteja, 2005; Munns and Tester, 2008; Turkan and Demiral, 2009; Xiong et al., 2002; Zhu, 2001, 2002b) and abiotic stress on rice (Gao et al.”
- Overexpression of OsVP1 and OsNHX1 Increases Tolerance to Drought and Salinity in Rice (2010, background): “Nearly half of all irrigated land is affected by salinity (Munns 2002; Flowers 2004).”