HALO · Understanding Halophytes for an Agriculture Worth its Salt
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2016-12-01 → 2019-11-30
- EU contribution
- €268,519
- Participants
- 2
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-GF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Understanding Halophytes for an Agriculture Worth its Salt
Global demand for food and farmland is rapidly growing due to increasing world population and urbanisation. As a result current estimates indicate that food production will have to increase by up to 70% by 2050 to keep pace with projected demands. Suitable resources for future agricultural expansion are however limited due to competing land and water uses for human consumption and non-food crops production. Thus, looking forward, we currently face one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century: to meet the world’s future food security and sustainability needs, food production must grow substantially despite a substantial decline in the availability of productive resources (soil and water). It is now clear that this conundrum cannot simply be solved with currently available soil and water resources and that the brackish/saline ones, nowadays unproductive, have to be included in the equation. Despite this, there is a growing recognition in the scientific and research and development communities of the limitations of current food production technologies. This perhaps is a reflection of the fact that crop selection process has been developed without considering the constraints occurring in more marginal and extreme environments. As a result, this selection for higher yields under optimal conditions during the green revolution of late 20th century has dramatically reduced the tolerance of elite crops to abiotic stresses. Fortunately, 450 million years of land plant evolution has generated biological complexity, which has allowed the so-called “extremophiles” to adapt to extreme environments, ranging from high salinity environments to extreme temperature changes and drought conditions in desert environments. Amongst these extremophiles, halophytes are an exciting group of plants that shows an elevate tolerance to salinity, thriving in salt concentrations damaging for most other angiosperms. The main objective of the HALO project is to elucidate the complementary morphological, physiological and anatomical characteristics that enable dicotyledonous halophyte to be successful on saline soils, including their unique ability to sequester cytotoxic Na and Cl ions in specialised external structures called salt bladders. This will reveal the fine print of one of the most interesting mechanisms evolved by plants over the course of evolution not only to deal with NaCl toxicity but also use it to thrive in these otherwise hostile NaCl-rich environments, opening up novel and previously unexplored breeding targets to improve salt tolerance in crops.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
One of the greatest challenges of the 21st century is to meet the world’s future food security and sustainability needs despite the rapid and large declines in suitable resources needed for the agricultural expansion required in the foreseeable future. As a result, interest in saline resources has escalated over the years but, notwithstanding great efforts from the scientific and breeding community, success in the development of salt tolerant crops remains elusive. For major breakthrough in crop breeding for salt tolerance, there is an urgent need to look at new options to find previously unexplored traits and mechanisms. With a multi-disciplinary approach and state-of-the-art biophysical and molecular techniques used in plant molecular biology, ion transport biology, halophyte ecophysiology and electrophysiology, the project will reveal the fine print of one of the most interesting mechanisms evolved by plants to deal with excess salts and thrive in these otherwise hostile environments. Given that dicotyledonous halophytes use sodium as a cheap osmoticum, the main objective of the project is to unravel the complementary morphological, physiological and anatomical characteristics that enable them to deal with cytotoxic sodium. The project will focus on four distinct halophytic species (facultative vs. obligate and with vs. without salt bladders): Atriplex nummularia, Chenopodium quinoa, Salicornia dolichostachya and Beta vulgaris ssp. marittima. By understanding how these different halophytes orchestrate efficient vacuolar Na sequestration with greater cytosolic K retention and bladder cell-based desalination, this project is expected to led the way to uncharted pathways to pinpoint key biological mechanisms that could improve tolerance in traditional salt sensitive crops. Public engagement activities and contact with the scientific and agricultural community will ensure a rapid transfer of knowledge and improve the likelihood of developing new salt tolerant crops.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
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Data: CORDIS, © European Union