Evaluating Predictive Values of Various Physiological Indices for Salinity Stress Tolerance in Wheat

By Min Zhu, Sergey Shabala, Lana Shabala, Yun Fan, Meixue Zhou. 2016

87 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Soil salinity is a worldwide issue that affects agricultural production. The understanding of mechanisms by which plants tolerate salt stress is crucial for breeding varieties for salt tolerance. In this work, a large number of wheat (Triticum aestivum and Triticum turgidum) cultivars were screened using a broad range of physiological indices. A regression analysis was then used to evaluate the relative contribution of each of these traits towards the overall salinity tolerance. In general, most of the bread wheats showed better Na+ exclusion that was associated with higher relative yield. Leaf K+/Na+ ratio and leaf and xylem K+ contents were the major factors determining salinity stress tolerance in wheat. Other important traits included high xylem K+ content, high stomatal conductance and low osmolality. Bread wheat and durum wheat showed different tolerance mechanisms, with leaf K+/Na+ content in durum wheat making no significant contributions to salt tolerance, while the important traits were leaf and xylem K+ contents. These results indicate that Na+ sequestration ability is much stronger in durum compared with bread wheat, most likely as a compensation for its lesser efficiency to exclude Na+ from transport to the shoot. We also concluded that plant survival scores under high salt stress can be used in bread wheat as a preliminary selection for Na+ exclusion gene(s).

Subfields: Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/eb5ea3cd8447d09dbaf8cb4cf278928d129d6c99

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Citations in the corpus

Review of grain threshing theory and technology (2018, background): “[35] Zhu M, Shabala S, Shabala L, Fan Y, Zhou M X.”
Smart Engineering of Genetic Resources for Enhanced Salinity Tolerance in Crop Plants (2016, background): “…KC/NaC ratio is potentially a beneficial physiological response to high salinity in crop plants, which is suggested as an indirect selection criterion for improving salinity tolerance (Houshmand et al., 2005; Arzani, 2008; Ashraf and Foolad, 2013; Yeilaghi et al., 2015; Zhu et al., 2016a, 2016b).”