Agriculture & Horticulture

Biography

Biography: Huajun Wang

Abstract

Soil salinization has become a major challenge for sustainable development of global agriculture. Given the limited range of genetic diversity in salt tolerance within traditional crops, stress tolerance mechanisms and genes must be identified in extreme halophytes and then introduced into traditional crops. Halogeton glomeratus (H. glomeratus) is a succulent annual halophyte and is one of the most widely distributed halophytes in Central Asia and arid regions in northwestern China. However, little is known about the physiological and molecular adaptive mechanism of tolerance to salt in this species. For this study, we analyzed the salt tolerance mechanisms of H. glomeratus under different NaCl stress conditions using morphology, cytology, physiology, biochemistry, and molecular biology approaches. Our results showed that H. glomeratus has a robust ability to tolerate salt and belongs to tolerance to osmotic stress category halophytes. The restrictive absorption of Na⁺ into roots and compartmentalization of Na⁺ into vacuoles of mesophyllous cell were considered to be the most critical aspect of salt tolerance in H. glomeratus. Then, three genes (HgS2, HgS3, and HgS4) were identified as candidate genes for drought resistance and salt tolerance in plants. These findings provide new insights into the molecular mechanisms that underlie salt tolerance of H. glomeratus and abundant gene resources to improve salt tolerance in plants. But so far we were unable to clearly address the question of how sodium is compartmentalized in the vacuoles and absorbed restrictively in roots of H. glomeratus. We speculated that different sodium transporters may be present in H. glomeratus and may efficiently compartmentalize sodium in the vacuoles and restrictive absorb in roots. Certainly, it is necessary to the further study to characterize sodium transporters in H. glomeratus.