Sorin Ciulca

Banat University of Agronomical Sciences and Veterinary Medicine · Department of Genetic engineering

General background: Earth is a saline planet. 71% of its surface is covered by salt water, and in addition, circa 6% of its total area and 20% of the irrigated land is affected by salinity, which means more than 800 millions hectares of land are affected by salinity worldwide (FAO. 2008. FAO Land and Plant Nutrition Service Management. http://www.fao.org/ag/agl/agll/spush). Either in Europe the situation is not better, where are important areas with saline soils, as in the hollow of Caspian Sea, Ukraine, Carpathian Basin, Pannonian Plain and Iberian Peninsula. In European Union soil salinity affects around 1 million hectares and is the main reason of desertification. Romania is one of the European countries with vast areas of low productivity soils containing toxic salts, being frequently associated with poverty. The problems determined by salinity are associated mostly with other abiotic stress factors, as drought and phosphorus deficit. Quality improvement of these soils by using amendments associated with irrigation and drainage needs much too high investments for semi-subsistence agriculture, specific to Romanian rural areas. Although, there are viable solutions, accessible to farmers, as identification of valuable local germplasm and its breeding, which can be realized due to technological evolution and improvement of modern biochemical, physiological and molecular analytical instruments, enabling to understand and use the genetic basis of cultivated species tolerant to salinity. The role of our researches would be the collection, identification and (biochemical, physiological and molecular) characterization of salt-tolerant landraces from the saline areas from Northern and Western Romania, from species of vegetables with still have local genetic resources in culture: tomato (Lycopersicum esculentum L.), bean (Phaseolus vulgaris), onion (Allium cepa) and garlic (Allium sativum). We will also create an online database with the results of biochemical, physiological, molecular and genetic studies, and by multiplication, conditioning and keeping, we will create a valuable collection of local landraces, assuring a seed resource for interested farmers, and genetic resources for plant breeders to create new cultivars. Scientific background: In the last 100 year, European agriculture suffered significant changes. At the beginning of the last century, agriculture was based mainly on traditional cultural systems, the main part of inputs and products (including seeds) deriving from the farm itself. In the present, most of the traditional cultivars were changed with commercial breeds and hybrids, with high productivity and genetic uniformity. It is difficult to measure exactly the level of losses produced by the reduction of genetic biodiversity of plant cultures, associated with the loss of some valuable landraces, but it is well-known that both on global and European level, there were massive losses of old breeds and landraces, which had a negative impact on genetic diversity. This erosion of agricultural biodiversity’s resources, which can represent a danger for future’s food safety and security, was acknowledged in a series of international legal instruments, such as the Convention for biological diversity and the International Treaty for the Plant Genetic Resources for food and agriculture. By joining these treaties, Romania is obliged to take all the measures for the protection and conservation of own plant genetic resources for use as food and agriculture (http://www.fao.org/ag//CGRFA/itpgr.htm). Starting with the objectives of treaty, the scope of our researches would be the identification, characterization, conservation and sustainable use of salt tolerant vegetal genetical resources for some horticultural species, for use as food and agriculture, based on complex biochemical, physiological and molecular biology methods. In the twentieth century, the green revolution resulted in plant varieties with improved productivity under favorable conditions. However, the progress in producing crop varieties with acceptable yield under saline conditions is still limited, perhaps due to the lack of genetic variation in the gene pools of crop plants (Ashraf and Akram 2009) and the fact that salt tolerance is a complex trait governed by large numbers of genes and its inheritance modes are difficult to expect (Flowers and Flowers 2005). Over the past two decades, many studies (hundreds) have reported the improvement of salt tolerance of glycophytic crop (and non-crop) plants by overexpressing single genes. The vast majority of those did not provide quantitative measurements of growth of the transformants under salt stress (Flowers 2004) but rather provided metabolic changes that are supposed to contribute to salt tolerance such as accumulation of osmolytes, activities of antioxidant enzymes, etc. Furthermore, in most cases the salt tolerance of transformants has been tested in the lab by growing the plants in presence of salt rather than in the field, where many environmental conditions such as light intensity, temperature, wind speed, water availability, etc interact to intensify salt stress (He et al 2005). It is not unfair to conclude that in most published reports, the increase in salt tolerance of the transformants has been marginal. Thus, such overexpression studies have provided insights into the metabolic functions of the overexpressed genes but the field performance of the transformants is yet to be verified. Objectives The main project objective is the identification of salt tolerant local landraces of tomato, bean, onion and garlic, for utilization in breeding programs and as seeds for farmers. Specific objectives: 1. Biochemical, physiological, genetic and molecular characterization of genotypes collected from saline areas in Western and Northern Romania. 2. Conservation with conventional and non-conventional methods of valuable genotypes, for present and future utilization. 3. Creation of an on-line database with researches in physiology, genetics and molecular biology of tested genotypes and dissemination of results through scientific publications and workshops. 4. Initiation of a breeding program for obtaining new genotypes, with tolerance to salinity and stable production.