Simulated field environment with combined salt and drought stresses as a platform for phenotyping plant tolerance to salinity

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Urs Schmidhalter
• Subject Area: Plant Cultivation, Plant Nutrition, Agricultural Technology
• Term: from 2009 to 2014
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 117288830

Salinity occurs often simultaneously with drought stress. Therefore, breeding for tolerance to combined both stresses can contribute significantly to crop yield. However, classical selection in salinity has generally been unsuccessful, partly due to high variability of salt stress resulting from the different salinity and drought status. Unfortunately, the use of unrealistic stress protocols for mimicking salinity and drought stress is the norm rather than the exception in biotechnological studies. Therefore, the great challenge is to gain knowledge required to develop plants with enhanced tolerance to field conditions. Our overall hypothesis is that a realistic stress protocol simulating a field environment with combined salt and drought stress as a platform for precision phenotyping of plant tolerance to salinity may solve this problem. This study will demonstrate that highly managed stress environments can be created and key traits of plants can be characterised by using advanced non-destructive sensors that are able to identify relevant traits of plants.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Participating Person: Privatdozent Dr. Yuncai Hu