This is the way: how plants respond to salt

Summary

Salt stress is one of the major threats to agriculture affecting >1 billion hectares of land worldwide. NaCl is the most common cause for salinization and causes osmotic and ionic stress in plants. Strikingly, plants exhibit specific responses to osmotic pressure, monovalent cations and sodium ions during NaCl stress. The research described in this thesis aims at the elucidation of a sodium-sensing mechanisms in plant roots. First, we dissected the individual stress components of salt stress using gene expression analysis and identified a group of genes that is specifically induced by sodium. Strikingly, the expression of this group of genes is repressed by the plant hormone abscisic acid. We found that abscisic acid also represses other sodium-specific responses. The spatial and temporal characteristics of the relationship between sodium-specific responses and abscisic acid was studied in more detail. Taken together, this research gives a new perspective on salt tolerance in plants.