Study Elucidates Salt Tolerance Breeding in Plants

A research team at Hebei Agricultural University, China conducted a study to explore the effects of salt tolerance gene accumulation on salt tolerance of tobacco plants. Their findings are published in Transgenic Research.

Salt stress is one of the major challenges in crop production, especially in plants that do not exhibit inherent salt tolerance traits. Thus, the research team developed transgenic tobacco plants using four types of plant expression vectors carrying salt tolerance genes (mtlD, mtlD + gutD, mtlD + gutD + BADH, mtlD + gutD + BADH + sacB) through Agrobacterium-mediated method. The transformed plants and controls were exposed to sodium chloride solution.

Results showed that as the number of genes increased, there was also an improvement in the salt tolerance of the plants. Salt tolerance indexes indicated height growth, biomass, chlorophyll content, net photosynthetic rate, Fv/Fm, and PI of all transgenic plants were lower than the indexes of plants of control plants under salt stress and when under clean water treatment. Multiple salt-tolerance indicators also showed that the average salt tolerance of each vector transgenic line was higher than that of the controls, and salt tolerance was greater in transgenic lines with multiple salt tolerance genes than in transgenic lines containing a single salt tolerance gene.

Read the research article in Transgenic Research.