Plant Evolution April 2022

Climate change is more than just heat stress - in agriculture, the progressive need for irrigation leads to soil salinity. In the Mediterranean area, salinity stress is a progressive issue in viticulture. One strategy is to develop new rootstocks for grafting that can cope with salt stress. In a joint project with Tunisian partners, we have been working on salt tolerance in V. sylvestris, the wild ancestor of domesticated Grapevine. Using a panel of cell cultures that had been generated from wild grapevines from North America, Tunisia, and the Rhine valley, we conduct a screen for salt tolerance and try to get insight into the underlying mechanisms.

Materials (on Ilias): scriptum . project report of our joint BMBF project . publication Ismail et al. 2012 on response of grapevine cells to salt stress .