ET

Scientists create saltwater tomatoes By Roger Highfield, Science Editor (Filed: 31/07/2001)

A GM tomato plant that thrives in salty water and might feed the world's population was unveiled yesterday by scientists.

As the first truly salt-tolerant crop, the tomatoes offer hope that other crops can be genetically modified for planting in areas that have salty irrigation water and salt-damaged soils.

More than a quarter of the world's irrigated areas are so salty that agricultural productivity is restricted. This has galvanised a worldwide effort to develop crops to cope with high-sodium conditions.

Although scientists have been trying to develop salt-tolerant crops using selective breeding techniques throughout the past century, none of those efforts has proven successful.

As a salty environment is likely to affect many processes within plants, it had been thought that creating GM salt-tolerant plants would be difficult, requiring manipulation of many genes.

Now, however, plant biologists at the University of California and Toronto University have found a simple solution. By introducing into tomatoes a single gene that encodes a protein that pumps out excess salt before it does damage, they have created GM plants that flourish in salty water and produce edible fruit.

"Since environmental stress due to salinity is one of the serious factors limiting productivity of crops, this will have significant implications for agriculture," said Prof Eduardo Blumwald.

The salt-tolerant tomato will be described by Prof Blumwald and Dr Hong-Xia Zhang in the August issue of the journal Nature Biotechnology.

-- Anonymous, August 01, 2001