Improving Wheat Salt Tolerance for Saline Agriculture

Salinity is a major abiotic stress that threatens crop yield and food supply in saline soil areas. Crops have evolved various strategies to facilitate survival and production of harvestable yield under salinity stress. Wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) is the main crop in arid and semiarid land areas, which are often affected by soil salinity. In this review, we summarize the conventional approaches to enhance wheat salt tolerance, including cross-breeding, exogenous application of chemical compounds, beneficial soil microorganisms, and transgenic engineering. We also propose several new breeding techniques for increasing salt tolerance in wheat, such as identifying new quantitative trait loci or genes related to salt tolerance, gene stacking and multiple genome editing, and wheat wild relatives and orphan crops domestication. The challenges and possible countermeasures in enhancing wheat salinity tolerance are also discussed.

Automated summary

Salinity is a major abiotic stress that affects crop yield and food supply in saline soil areas. Wheat, being the main crop in these areas, has developed various strategies to enhance salt tolerance through conventional breeding approaches and new techniques such as gene identification, gene stacking, and utilization of wild relatives.