One approach to improving desert agriculture is to increase the tolerance to salinity of existing crops, such as wheat, barley and tomatoes. The aim of research in The Salt Lab is to make fundamental discoveries into the molecular genetic basis for increased salinity tolerance in some plants, and apply these discoveries to increase the salinity tolerance of crops such as wheat, barley and tomatoes. This builds directly on work over the past decade where mechanisms of tolerance have been discovered and characterized, then delivered to commercial crops using both GM and marker-assisted selection.
