First paper published – Epidermal bladder cells confer salinity stress tolerance in the halophyte qu
I will happily begin my first post with a paper recently published in Plant Cell & Environment focusing on the halophyte quinoa and its salt bladders, balloon like cells found at the surface of the leaves (they are quite pretty as you can see in the picture below).
Picture by Nadia Bazihizina
In this paper, with a series of experiment, we demonstrate for the first time the importance of epidermal bladder cells in halophyte’s ability to thrive in saline soils. This topic is actually pretty interesting, or more precisely – it is something that we need to study as so far we still don’t fully understand why halophytes, that are naturally “salt-loving” plants, can survive and often thrive in salt-rich environments where most of the remaining species cannot survive.
The global demand for food and farmland is rapidly growing due to increasing world population and urbanization and it is estimated that food production would need to increase by up to 70% by 2050 to keep pace with projected demands. At the same time, however, productive and good land and fresh water resources will become less available for agriculture. Well, on the other hand, we have large amount of saline water and lands that until recently were not very useful for agriculture. To have an idea of how much saline resources are currently non-productive but could represent a gold mine for agriculture here are some number that I took from the Salt Farm Texel website. “Worldwide about 1.5 billion hectares of land is salt affected and this number increases with 3 hectare every minute and .. the amount of brackish water is equal to the amount of fresh water”. Clearly we still have to understand how to include these saline resources to obtain sustainable agricultural productions, mostly because most agricultural crop are salt-sensitive. In this context halophytes could play a vital role, as crops in their own right (the golden example is quinoa) and also as models for generating ST in traditional crops.
Citation:
Kiani-Pouya, A., Roessner, U., Jayasinghe, N. S., Lutz, A., Rupasinghe, T., Bazihizina, N., Bohm, J., Alharbi, S., Hedrich, R., and Shabala, S. (2017) Epidermal bladder cells confer salinity stress tolerance in the halophyte quinoa and Atriplex species. Plant, Cell & Environment,
doi: 10.1111/pce.12995. (link to full text)
