Abstract
Increasing soil salinity in the agricultural fields all over the world is a matter of concern. Salinity poses a serious threat to the normal growth and development of crop plants. What adds to the concern is that all the cereal crops are sensitive to increasing soil salinity. So it is implacable to either search for salinity resistant varieties of crop plants or transform them genetically to sustain growth and reproducibility at increasing salinity stress. For the second perspective, mining the salt tolerant genes in the close relatives of cereal crops apparently becomes important, and most specifically in the salt tolerant grasses (STGs). STGs include the halophytes, facultative halophytes and salt-tolerant glycophytes of the family Poaceae. In this review the potentiality of STGs has been evaluated for increasing the salinity tolerance of cereal crops. STGs are capable of surviving at increasing salt stress by utilizing different mechanisms that include vacuolization of toxic Na+ and Cl- in mature or senescing leaves, secretion of excess salts by salt glands, accumulation of osmolytes like proline and glycine betaine, and scavenging of ROS by antioxidative enzymes. The STGs are a therefore a potent source of salt tolerant genes.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/1999-3110-55-31) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Highlights
Salinity is one of the major abiotic stresses that hinder the performance of the crop plants all over the world
In most of the glycophytic grasses like Cynodon, Sporobolus, Zoysia and Buchloe salinity tolerance was positively correlated with Na+ and Cl− secretion through salt glands (Marcum 1999). This indicates that the presence of salt glands and Na+ exclusion is an important criterion for the primary selection of salt tolerant grasses (STGs) from the grass species, the exact mechanism of salinity tolerance in STGs may differ from species to species
STGs offer a promising system for the analysis of the mechanisms associated with salinity stress tolerance
Summary
Salinity is one of the major abiotic stresses that hinder the performance of the crop plants all over the world. The agricultural scenario is getting worse as the agricultural land is In this situation, one of the ways is to make the crop plants genetically engineered to sustain their growth and productivity in such challenging environment. In most of the glycophytic grasses like Cynodon, Sporobolus, Zoysia and Buchloe salinity tolerance was positively correlated with Na+ and Cl− secretion through salt glands (Marcum 1999). This indicates that the presence of salt glands and Na+ exclusion is an important criterion for the primary selection of STGs from the grass species, the exact mechanism of salinity tolerance in STGs may differ from species to species. Some of the STG species that are discussed in this review for their salt tolerant genes are recorded in Table 1 with their most probable salt tolerance mechanisms that have been focused in different transgenic experiments
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