Salt tolerance strategies of the ancient Andean crop quinoa

作者：Viviana Jaramillo Roman · 年份：2021 · DOI：10.18174/535249 · 被引用次数：2 · 研究领域：Seed and Plant Biochemistry

Soil salinization is a serious threat to agriculture, jeopardizing global food security and causing huge economic losses every year. Plants face formidable challenges when growing under saline conditions. The high concentration of ions in the root environment hampers water uptake, yet the accumulation of ions in plant tissues induces cytotoxicity. Unfortunately, soil salinization is likely to increase in the context of climate change, which lead to sea level rising and shortage of fresh-water sources. Hence, crop production might rely on irrigation with brackish/ saline water. In addition, the increasing global food demand calls for cultivation in less favourable soils including saline deltas around the world. Improvement of salt tolerance of existing crops might not be sufficient under increasing salinization, so the exploration of new, more salt tolerant crops appears to be essential to ensure food supply. Chenopodium quinoa is -at least outside S. America- a relatively new crop that has gained ground due to its resilience to withstand abiotic stress, especially soil salinity. Quinoa can potentially contribute to ensure food security and it has a healthy balance of proteins with all the essential amino acids, carbohydrates (starch), fibre and seed oil. In this thesis novel insights on the mechanisms and processes that underlie the remarkable salt tolerance of quinoa are provided and traits that may be used to improve crop salt tolerance are described.In Chapter 2 we evaluat...