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Genomics of Salinity

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Plant Genomics and Climate Change

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Abstract

Salinity stress is one of the most important abiotic stresses faced by farmers. Salinity stress is responsible for significant loss of yield, and increasing salinity leads to loss of productive arable land. Salinity stress is especially important in drier areas, where evaporation leads to elevated levels of salt. Global warming will lead to higher temperatures which may be accompanied by increases in soil salinity. The expanding human population means there is a need to grow more crops, on less arable land, and so breeding salt tolerant plants is required to increase productivity, particularly in marginal areas.

This chapter describes how crop species react to salinity stress and where known, the genes and gene networks involved in the response to salinity are presented. Response to salinity is not a simple trait. Different genes are involved in different crops, and different crops handle salinity stress using different methods. These methods can be grouped into three main mechanisms: osmotic tolerance, ion exclusion and ion tolerance. Recent advances in the transfer of known salinity tolerance related genes into crop species are also presented. In most crops, the introduction of these genes has led to varying degrees of increased salinity tolerance, with some counter-intuitive results. The implications of these studies, as well as some future paths to improve salinity tolerance in crops are discussed.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Agriculture and Plant Sciences, University of Queensland, 83 Harley Teakle Building, Brisbane, QLD, 4072, Australia

    Philipp Emanuel Bayer B.Sc.

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  1. Philipp Emanuel Bayer B.Sc.
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Correspondence to Philipp Emanuel Bayer B.Sc. .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Plant Biology and Institute of, University of Western Australia, Crawley, Perth, Australia

    David Edwards

  2. School of Plant Biology and Institute of, University of Western Australia, Crawley, Queensland, Australia

    Jacqueline Batley

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Bayer, P.E. (2016). Genomics of Salinity. In: Edwards, D., Batley, J. (eds) Plant Genomics and Climate Change. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-3536-9_9

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