Genetics of salinity tolerance traits in crops – and developing saltwater-based agricultural systems

Mark Tester

** Center for Desert Agriculture, King Abdullah University of Science & Technology, Saudi Arabia.

mark.tester@kaust.edu.sa

Abstract

One-third of the world’s food is produced under irrigation. This is challenged by over- exploitation of water resources and global environmental change. This talk will focus on the use of forward genetics to discover genes affecting salinity tolerance in barley, rice, and tomatoes, along with some recent genomics in quinoa, a partially domesticated crop with
high salinity tolerance. 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. For tomatoes, the focus is on association genetics of tolerance in wild tomatoes. Tomatoes have been phenotyped in The Plant Accelerator ® and in the field for three years, and analyses are currently in progress. For quinoa, the genome has been sequenced to high quality, and now about 1,000 lines have been re-sequenced. Up to 1,300 lines are being phenotyped in The Plant Accelerator and over a dozen field trial sites globally to identify natural variation in a range of domestication and tolerance traits. The application of this approach provides opportunities to significantly increase abiotic stress tolerance in crops and thus contribute to increasing agricultural production in many regions. A complementary approach to increasing tolerance of crops to salinity is to domesticate plants that have high salinity tolerance. We are starting to take this approach, working on species such as Salicornia, which produces an oil-rich seed whilst growing in undiluted seawater. To deliver our research, we have now established a company, Red Sea Farms LLC, where we combine engineering and plant science to develop and use saltwater-based agricultural systems, to reduce the water and carbon footprint of modern agriculture, and to do this environmentally sustainably and economically viably.

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Keywords: salinity tolerance; genetics; neo-domestication; delivery of research.