Wheat mitochondrial proteomics: Searching for biomarkers of salinity tolerance.
The effect of salinity on plant growth
Salinity describes soils that contain high concentrations of water-soluble salts, mainly NaCl. Salinity is usually caused by two mechanisms: groundwater salinity and irrigation salinity. Groundwater salinity occurs when saline groundwater is present in the upper layers of the soil. This commonly occurs in areas where native vegetation has been cleared and evaporation rates are high, like the West Australian wheat belt. Irrigation salinity occurs when irrigation water accumulates in the upper layers of soil. When this water evaporates, the salts remain in the soil. Irrigation salinity is common in areas where soil drainage is poor and low quality water is used for irrigation (Rengasamy, 2006).
Salinity dramatically impedes plant growth, leading to a decrease in crop yield and quality. This occurs due to two mechanisms: osmotic stress and ion toxicity. Osmotic stress occurs because saline soils have high osmotic potential, so plants which grow in saline soils have difficulty taking up water, resulting in low cell turgor and slow shoot growth. Ion toxicity occurs because saline water moves up the transpiration stream, causing Na+ and Cl- to accumulate
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However, genetic sequence information on wheat is rapidly increasing (Paux et al., 2008), which will greatly increase the power of proteomics applied to wheat. There are several advantages to studying the molecular properties of wheat. First, molecular-level discoveries are more likely to be successfully applied in crop improvement strategies, as there is no “species boundary” to traverse. Second, there is a wide variety of genetic and phenotypic traits distributed across commercial wheat genotypes, as well as