Published by Oxford University Press [2006] on behalf of the Society for Experimental Biology
Preface
The idea for a session on ‘Salinity’ at the Society for Experimental Biology's Annual Meeting in 2005 came from a brief meeting I had with David Evans, the Society's Cell Biology Secretary, over breakfast two years earlier. Sponsorship by the Society and the Journal of Experimental Botany allowed me to invite speakers from Australia, Europe, and the United States of America to contribute to the meeting, which was held at the Vila Universitaria Campus of the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona in Bellaterra, on the outskirts of Barcelona in July 2005. José M Pardo of the Instituto de Recursos Naturales y Agrobiologia in Seville agreed to join me as co-organizer and co-editor.Salinity has been a threat to agriculture in some parts of the world for over 3000 years: in recent times, the threat has grown. As the world population has increased so has the need to grow more food. This has required an increase in the area of land under cultivation and, particularly since the nineteenth century, a need to increase the productivity of land—to increase yields per hectare. The need to find more land brought agriculture to marginal areas that are salt-affected, by salts from current or past oceans. More worryingly, agriculture has itself also brought salt to the soil; both through irrigation and forest clearance. The combination of population growth and land degradation has led plant scientists to the view that increasing the salt tolerance of crops will be an important component of future agriculture.
The threat of salinization to agriculture should bring together scientists from the various disciplines involved; soil scientists, agronomists, plant breeders, plant physiologists, and molecular biologists. Rarely, however, have such teams been formed. In this Special Issue of the Journal of Experimental Botany, José and I have tried to generate some of this inter-disciplinary culture. The Special Issue begins with a description of salinization from the view of a soil scientist, working in Australia, a country severely afflicted by salinity. Papers that focus on the breeding of cereals and of tomato follow. The remainder of the Special Issue concentrates on changes in cells induced by salinity and then on that still-unresolved problem of how sodium ions get into plants.
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  P. Malagoli, D. T. Britto, L. M. Schulze, and H. J. Kronzucker Futile Na+ cycling at the root plasma membrane in rice (Oryza sativa L.): kinetics, energetics, and relationship to salinity tolerance J. Exp. Bot., November 1, 2008; 59(15): 4109 - 4117. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
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