Engineering saline resistance in land plants

在全球范围内，农业每年需要全球70%的淡水消耗，并利用50%的可居住土地。为了确保不断增长的人口的粮食安全，同时采用可持续的农业做法来减缓气候变化，我们必须开发创新方法，最大限度地提高粮食生产效率。理想的性状通常在野生或祖先作物物种中发现，这些性状在现代作物品种中没有被选择，随后就丢失了。这些有益性状的发现和转移为科学家提高作物对生物和非生物胁迫的抗逆性提供了一条有希望的途径。一个非常理想的特性是能够过滤进入植物组织的盐，使它们能够利用盐水，而盐水通常会杀死植物。这是通过对形成其细胞外基质的多糖进行修饰而在海藻中实现的。由于植物和藻类之间潜在的生物化学不同，这些修饰不可能直接转移到作物植物中。幸运的是，在海草多糖中发现了类似的修饰。海草与陆地作物植物关系密切，但它们回到了海洋环境。海草和农作物共有的形态特征使我们能够在它们之间转移这些特征。此外，最近对海草Zostera基因组的测序已经揭示了这种修饰的候选基因，以及将这种优势性状转移到作物植物的可能方法。该项目将破译植物和半合成生物材料耐盐性所需的机制。这将使我们能够将这种过滤带电粒子的生物技术应用于医疗（改善透析）、工业（改善反渗透）和农业应用（不需要淡水的作物）。

Globally, agriculture requires 70% of yearly global freshwater consumption and utilises 50% of habitable land. In order to ensure food security for the growing population, whilst incorporating sustainable agricultural practices to mitigate climate change, we must develop innovative approaches to maximise the efficiency of food production. Desirable traits are often found in wild or ancestral crop species, which have not been selected for in modern crop varieties, and subsequently lost. The discovery and transfer of these beneficial traits is a promising route for scientists to enhance crop resilience to biotic and abiotic stresses. A highly desirable traits is the capacity to filter salts from entering plant tissues, allowing them to utilise saline water which would normally kill plants. This is achieved in marine algae (seaweeds) via modifications of polysaccharides that form their extracellular matrices. The direct transfer of these modifications into crop plants is not possible due to the different underlying biochemistry between plants and algae. Fortuitously, a similar modification has been found within polysaccharides of seagrasses. Seagrasses are closely related to terrestrial crop plants, but they returned to the marine environment. The shared morphological traits of seagrasses and crops allows us to transfer these traits between them. Additionally, the recent sequencing of the seagrass Zostera genome has revealed candidate genes for this modification, and possible approaches towards the transfer of this advantageous trait to crop plants. This project will decipher the mechanisms required for saline tolerance in plants and semi-synthetic biomaterials. This will allow us to transfer this biotechnology for filtering charged particles into medical (improved dialysis), industrial (improves reverse osmosis), and agricultural applications (crops that require no freshwater).