Scientists in China have identified a gene involved in alkaline tolerance in crops that may help improve yields in sodic environments through genetic engineering. The study, led by Prof. Xie Qi's team from the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in collaboration with seven other institutions, has been published in Science.

There are more than one billion hectares of saline and alkaline soil in the world, with about 60% classified as highly sodic. This prompts the development of saline- and alkaline-resistant crops as an urgent global challenge. However, alkaline tolerance in plants has not been well studied. The researchers first performed a genome-wide association study in a diverse sorghum panel and identified an important locus, Alkaline tolerance 1 (AT1), that encodes an atypical G protein Î? subunit and controls alkaline tolerance. The AT1 gene has orthologs in other plants; in rice, it was named GS3.


New Gene Discovery Points Way to Better Alkaline Tolerance in Crops----Chinese Academy of Sciences (cas.cn)