Australian scientists have crossed a modern wheat variety with a wild ancestral cousin to produce a high-yielding salt-tolerant plant that will help tackle world food shortages due to soil salinity.
Matthew Gilliham,of the University of Adelaide, said the new variety of durum wheat would be made freely available to publicly funded breeding programs overseas. Field trials in Moree and at other sites across southern Australia have shown that the new variety has a grain yield in salty soil of up to 25 per cent higher than that of the standard variety.
Dr Gilliham said his team’s study was the first in the world to demonstrate on a farm, not just in the laboratory or greenhouse, that a new salt-tolerant wheat had improved yield. “This is why this work is particularly important, we think,” he said.
The results are published in the Nature Biotechnology journal today. The team first identified a gene in an ancestral salt-tolerant relative of commercial durum wheat that removes sodium from water as it is transported from the roots to the leaves.
Dr Gilliham said their challenge was then to develop a new cross-breed which had this gene, without reducing the crop yield.
Field tests showed the new hybrid performed the same under normal conditions as the commercial wheat without the gene, but outperformed it under salty conditions.
Team member Rana Munns, of CSIRO, said salinity, which affected more than 20 per cent of the world’s agricultural soils, posed an increasing threat to food production due to climate change.
Dr Gilliham said that salinity was also a problem in wheat-growing areas in Australia.
“With global population estimated to reach 9 billion by 2050, and the demand for food expected to rise by 100 per cent in this time, salt-tolerant crops will be an important tool to ensure future food security,” he said.
Durum wheat is used to make food products including pasta and couscous, and is particularly susceptible to soil salinity.
A new variety of bread-making wheat with the salt tolerance gene is also being developed by the team.
