Potential Breeding Strategies for Improving Salt Tolerance in Crop Plants

Abstract Salinity is one of the significant abiotic stresses that negatively affect plant production processes, growth, and development, which ultimately reduce yield. Plants adapt specific mechanisms to withstand saline conditions and activate diverse salt tolerance genes to counter osmotic and oxidative stresses induced by salinity. Genetic development in salinity tolerance is quite complex, while advancement has made less progress than expectation over the past few decades. Generating an explosion of genetics- and genomics-related information and technology in recent decades pledge to deliver innovative and advanced resources for the potential production of tolerant genotypes. Despite considerable progress in defining the primary salinity tolerance mechanisms, main obstacles are yet to be solved in the translation and incorporation of the resulting molecular knowledge into the plant breeding activities. Diverse approaches are proposed to enhance plant breeding efficacy to increase plant productivity in saline environments. Understanding the genetics of salt tolerance is a difficult task because multiple genes and pathways are involved. Important advances in tools and methods for updating and manipulating plant genomics knowledge provide detailed insights and dissect the salinity tolerance mechanism accomplished by the breeding goals. Genome-wide analyses (GWA) identify SNP variations and functional effects that appear to be the way of the future for developing salinity-tolerant plants. Gene discovery to manipulate the molecular mechanisms which underlie the complex phenotype of salinity tolerance methods, identification of genes, QTL, association mapping, linkage, and functional genomics, such as transcript identifying and proteins related to salinity, is necessary. The present analysis also discussed some of the opportunities and challenges, focusing on molecular breeding strategies used in conjunction with other crop development approaches to growing elite salt-tolerant lines.