Abstract
Salinity is one of the major environmental factors that negatively affect crop development, particularly at the early growth stage of a plant and consequently the final yield. Therefore, a set of 50 wild barley (Hordeum vulgare ssp. spontaneum, Hsp) introgression lines (ILs) was used to detect QTL alleles improving germination and seedling growth under control, 75 mM, and 150 mM NaCl conditions. Large variation was observed for germination and seedling growth related traits that were highly heritable under salinity stress. In addition, highly significant differences were obtained for five salinity tolerance indices and between treatments as well. A total of 90 and 35 significant QTL were identified for ten investigated traits and for tolerance indices, respectively. The Hsp introgression alleles are involved in improving salinity tolerance at forty (43.9%) out of 90 QTL including introgression lines S42IL-109 (2H), S42IL-116 (4H), S42IL-132 (6H), S42IL-133 (7H), S42IL-148 (6H), and S42IL-176 (5H). Interestingly, seven exotic QTL alleles were successfully validated in the wild barley ILs including S42IL-127 (5H), 139 (7H), 125 (5H), 117 (4H), 118 (4H), 121 (4H), and 137 (7H). We conclude that the barley introgression lines contain numerous germination and seedling growth-improving novel QTL alleles, which are effective under salinity conditions.
Highlights
Salinity, together with drought, is a serious constraint to food security in many parts of the world due to it suppressing plant growth, development, and crop productivity, and restricting the use of agricultural land
The combined analysis of variance (ANOVA) revealed that all effects of genotypes, treatments, and genotype by treatment interactions effects were highly significant for all studied traits
We found that introgression lines (ILs) S42IL-109, S42 IL-120, S42 IL-125, S42 IL-126, S42 IL-127, S42IL-132, S42 IL-148, and S42IL-176 showed significant superiority in seedling growth-related traits under both salinity treatments compared to Scarlett, indicating osmotolerance at seedling phase
Summary
Together with drought, is a serious constraint to food security in many parts of the world due to it suppressing plant growth, development, and crop productivity, and restricting the use of agricultural land. Barley is relatively salt-tolerant and has the advantage of growing in marginal environments that are unsuitable for other cereal crops [9,10]. It is oftentimes used as a model plant for understanding salinity adaptation mechanisms in crops and for studying the germination in monocots [11,12]. A clear reduction in germination percentage, rate, shoot length, root length, root fresh and dry weights, and relative growth rate was reported by increasing salinity levels in barley [10,13,14,15,16,17]
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